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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
Meeting Spotlight
2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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High-temperature plumbing and advanced reactors
The use of nuclear fission power and its role in impacting climate change is hotly debated. Fission advocates argue that short-term solutions would involve the rapid deployment of Gen III+ nuclear reactors, like Vogtle-3 and -4, while long-term climate change impact would rely on the creation and implementation of Gen IV reactors, “inherently safe” reactors that use passive laws of physics and chemistry rather than active controls such as valves and pumps to operate safely. While Gen IV reactors vary in many ways, one thing unites nearly all of them: the use of exotic, high-temperature coolants. These fluids, like molten salts and liquid metals, can enable reactor engineers to design much safer nuclear reactors—ultimately because the boiling point of each fluid is extremely high. Fluids that remain liquid over large temperature ranges can provide good heat transfer through many demanding conditions, all with minimal pressurization. Although the most apparent use for these fluids is advanced fission power, they have the potential to be applied to other power generation sources such as fusion, thermal storage, solar, or high-temperature process heat.1–3
Akio Yamamoto, Akinori Giho, Tomohiro Endo
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 192 | Number 3 | December 2018 | Pages 240-253
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2018.1501978
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A flux region assignment algorithm to increase cache efficiency for the method of characteristics (MOC) is proposed. In order to minimize the stride of memory access, flux region identifications are assigned based on the ray trace sequence during the MOC calculation. The present method is implemented in the three-dimensional transport code GENESIS and its performance is confirmed through verification calculations ranging from single pressurized water reactor (PWR) fuel assembly to PWR full-core benchmark problems. Quantitative comparison of cache efficiency is carried out and the present method shows improved cache efficiency, which results in a reduction in computation time. The present method can reduce computational time by improving cache efficiency while suppressing memory requirement.
