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Division Spotlight
Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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Glass strategy: Hanford’s enhanced waste glass program
The mission of the Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection (ORP) is to complete the safe cleanup of waste resulting from decades of nuclear weapons development. One of the most technologically challenging responsibilities is the safe disposition of approximately 56 million gallons of radioactive waste historically stored in 177 tanks at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
ORP has a clear incentive to reduce the overall mission duration and cost. One pathway is to develop and deploy innovative technical solutions that can advance baseline flow sheets toward higher efficiency operations while reducing identified risks without compromising safety. Vitrification is the baseline process that will convert both high-level and low-level radioactive waste at Hanford into a stable glass waste form for long-term storage and disposal.
Although vitrification is a mature technology, there are key areas where technology can further reduce operational risks, advance baseline processes to maximize waste throughput, and provide the underpinning to enhance operational flexibility; all steps in reducing mission duration and cost.
Jiashuang Wan, Pengfei Wang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 194 | Number 6 | June 2020 | Pages 433-446
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2019.1710419
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The task of this investigation is to design a controller that has a strong robustness in various operating conditions. A new structure of state feedback assisted classical control (SFACC) that uses a differential lag compensator in the inner classical control loop is proposed to improve the robustness of original SFACC. The linear quadratic Gaussian with loop transfer recovery (LQG/LTR) at the plant output is employed to design the robust controller in the outer control loop. A comparison of the performance and robustness between the gain-insensitive controller and an existing LQG/LTR controller is made by nonlinear simulations. The proposed gain-insensitive LQG/LTR controller can give satisfying performance for both reactor power and coolant temperature over a wide range of reactor operations.