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Division members promote the advancement of mathematical and computational methods for solving problems arising in all disciplines encompassed by the Society. They place particular emphasis on numerical techniques for efficient computer applications to aid in the dissemination, integration, and proper use of computer codes, including preparation of computational benchmark and development of standards for computing practices, and to encourage the development on new computer codes and broaden their use.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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.
Paul K. Romano, Steven P. Hamilton, Ronald O. Rahaman, April Novak, Elia Merzari, Sterling M. Harper, Patrick C. Shriwise, Thomas M. Evans
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 195 | Number 4 | April 2021 | Pages 391-411
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1830620
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
While the literature has numerous examples of Monte Carlo (MC) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) coupling, most are hardwired codes intended primarily for research rather than as stand-alone, general-purpose applications. In this work, we describe an open source application, the Exascale Nuclear Reactor Investigative COde (ENRICO), which enables coupled neutronic and thermal-hydraulic simulations between multiple codes that can be chosen at run time (as opposed to a coupling between two specific codes). The application has been designed such that the control flow logic, domain mapping, nonlinear fixed-point iteration, solution transfers, and convergence checks are all agnostic to the underlying physics solvers used. Special emphasis has also been placed on enabling efficient execution on distributed-memory computing environments. The transfer of solution fields between solvers is performed in memory rather than through filesystem input/output. Additionally, solvers can be configured to run on overlapping or disjoint sets of processes.
To date, coupling with the OpenMC and Shift MC codes, the Nek5000 CFD code, and a simplified heat diffusion and subchannel solver has been implemented in ENRICO. We present results for coupled simulations of a single light water reactor fuel assembly based on the NuScale reactor using various combinations of the physics solvers. For this problem, the coupled simulations are shown to converge in about four Picard iterations. A comparison of the heat source and temperature distributions computed by ENRICO using OpenMC coupled with Nek5000 and Shift coupled with Nek5000 illustrates remarkable agreement between the codes.