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2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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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
R. D. M. Garcia
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 196 | Number 3 | March 2022 | Pages 250-275
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2021.1975480
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The analytical discrete ordinates (ADO) method is used to develop a solution to a one-dimensional model of particle transport in ducts that includes wall migration. Particle reemission from the wall is described by a nonlocal, exponential displacement kernel. Since the governing transport equation of the model is not directly amenable to a solution by the ADO method, an alternative transport equation is derived first. For an approximation based on a half-range quadrature of order , the ADO solution of the alternative equation becomes available once techniques of linear algebra are used to solve a quadratic eigenproblem of order for the eigenvalues and eigenvectors. The solution is expressed as a superposition of 4N modes, which are constructed from 2N positive/negative pairs of separation constants (the reciprocals of the square roots of the eigenvalues) and associated eigenvectors. Compatibility conditions that the solution must satisfy in order to also solve the governing equation of the model result in a reduction of the number of relevant modes to 2N + 2, just two in excess of the number of modes in the solution of the problem without wall migration. Highly accurate numerical results for the reflection and transmission probabilities are reported for isotropic and monodirectional incidence.