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Accelerator Applications
The division was organized to promote the advancement of knowledge of the use of particle accelerator technologies for nuclear and other applications. It focuses on production of neutrons and other particles, utilization of these particles for scientific or industrial purposes, such as the production or destruction of radionuclides significant to energy, medicine, defense or other endeavors, as well as imaging and diagnostics.
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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
Nicholas F. Herring, Benjamin S. Collins, Thomas J. Downar, Aaron M. Graham
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 2 | February 2023 | Pages 291-307
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2082231
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work presents a new formulation of the axial expansion transport method explicitly using Legendre polynomials for arbitrarily high-order expansions. This new formulation also features an alternative method of axial leakage calculation to allow for nonextruded flat source region meshes. This alternative axial leakage is introduced alongside a balance equation requirement to ensure that neutron balance is preserved in the coarse mesh for a given axial leakage formulation, which allows for effective coarse mesh finite difference acceleration. A matrix exponential table method is derived to allow for fast computations of arbitrarily high-order matrix exponentials for this work and precludes the need for further research into matrix exponential calculations for this method. Numerical results are presented that demonstrate the stability of the axial expansion method in systems with voidlike regions, showcase the speedup from matrix exponential tables, and investigate the axial convergence of the method in terms of both expansion order and mesh size.