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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2025
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October 2025
Latest News
Shifting the paradigm of supply chain
Chad Wolf
When I began my nuclear career, I was coached up in the nuclear energy culture of the day to “run silent, run deep,” a mindset rooted in the U.S. Navy’s submarine philosophy. That was the norm—until Fukushima.
The nuclear renaissance that many had envisioned hit a wall. The focus shifted from expansion to survival. Many utility communications efforts pivoted from silence to broadcast, showcasing nuclear energy’s elegance and reliability. Nevertheless, despite being clean baseload 24/7 power that delivered a 90 percent capacity factor or higher, nuclear energy was painted as risky and expensive (alongside energy policies and incentives that favored renewables).
Economics became a driving force threatening to shutter nuclear power. The Delivering the Nuclear Promise initiative launched in 2015 challenged the industry to sustain high performance yet cut costs by up to 30 percent.
Ilyas Yilgor, Eymon Lan, Shanbin Shi
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 5 | May 2023 | Pages 753-770
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2087835
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Interest in heat pipe microreactors (HPMRs) has recently grown due to several unique advantages compared with other reactor types. These compact and mobile reactors are expected to find applications in a variety of fields to provide carbon-free power in remote or off-grid locations. Experimental work is needed to aid and expedite the design and licensing of future HPMRs, especially on the validation of heat pipe performance as key heat transfer components. A Low-Temperature Heat Pipe Test Facility (LTHPF) was designed and constructed according to previously developed scaling laws to bypass the difficulties of experimenting with liquid-metal working fluids by using surrogate fluids. The design, instrumentation, and experimental capabilities of the facility are described. The testing conditions, including various operating limits and the ranges of the nondimensional parameters used for scaling analysis, are reported. It is found that certain nondimensional parameters could yield a wide range over the operating conditions, whereas some showed minimal variation when water was used as the working fluid. Last, the performance of several types of wicks, including the annulus-screen, groove-screen, and wrapped-screen designs, were investigated for applications in the LTHPF. It is observed that the groove-screen wick structure provided slight improvement in capillary limits at higher temperatures and that the wrapped-screen wick yielded lower capillary limits due to the absence of a low-resistance flow path for the liquid.