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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 8–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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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Latest News
DNFSB’s Summers ends board tenure, extending agency’s loss of quorum
Lee
Summers
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, the independent agency responsible for ensuring that Department of Energy facilities are protective of public health and safety, announced that the board’s acting chairman, Thomas Summers, has concluded his service with the agency, having completed his second term as a board member on October 18.
Summers’ departure leaves Patricia Lee, who joined the DNFSB after being confirmed by the Senate in July 2024, as the board’s only remaining member and acting chair. Lee’s DNFSB board term ends in October 2027.
Cheng Peng, Youya Song, Jian Deng, Sen Mao, Jiang Wu
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 6 | June 2023 | Pages 1117-1132
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2143208
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Third-generation advanced pressurized water reactors adopt the external reactor vessel cooling (ERVC) strategy to ensure the pressure vessel is not at risk of melt-through in severe accidents, thereby completely controlling radioactive materials in the pile. However, due to its long-term service, vessel aging, steel corrosion, and oxidation may lead to deformation at different locations on its outer surface, forming various shapes of sawtooth structures, thus affecting the heat transfer behavior of the high-temperature walls during ERVC. In this paper, the Fluent code, coupled with boiling heat and mass transfer equations based on user-defined functions (UDFs) was used to simulate the thermal-hydraulic processes on the lower head with three typical sawtooth structures. The distribution of the stagnation zone for vapor buildup was the main focus. By varying the heat flux installed on the lower head and the inlet velocity of the flow channel, the onset time of critical boiling and the development of the location of critical heat flux over time were further investigated. It was found that a long period of unstable bubble generation and detachment before the onset of critical boiling may occur on the lower head. These findings can provide technical support for the safety design of advanced nuclear reactors.