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Human Factors, Instrumentation & Controls
Improving task performance, system reliability, system and personnel safety, efficiency, and effectiveness are the division's main objectives. Its major areas of interest include task design, procedures, training, instrument and control layout and placement, stress control, anthropometrics, psychological input, and motivation.
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2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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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Latest News
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
Kaijie Zhu, Boran Kong, Han Zhang, Jiong Guo, Fu Li
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 6 | June 2023 | Pages 1174-1196
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2143706
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Recently, a three-dimensional method of characteristics (MOC) code called Advanced Reactor CHaracteristics tracER (ARCHER) has been developed by the Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology, Tsinghua University, to solve the neutron transport problem in high-temperature gas-cooled reactors (HTRs) with explicit pebble-bed geometry. Although the spatial domain decomposition using the message passing interface (MPI) and the ray parallel using OpenMP have been implemented in the previous version of ARCHER, in order to simulate practical HTR problems it is still necessary to reduce the great computational burden through efficient algorithms. Therefore, the linear source approximation (LSA) scheme, which allows coarser transport calculation grids while maintaining high accuracy, has been added in the latest version of ARCHER to relieve memory pressure together with the MPI-based spatial domain decomposition. Moreover, on-the-fly calculation of the relative position coordinates of the ray segment center can further reduce the memory for storing segment information under LSA. In addition, time-consuming MOC transport sweeps can be reduced greatly with coarse-mesh finite difference (CMFD) acceleration. Numerical results show that both LSA and CMFD acceleration contribute to simulate the practical HTR-10 problem successfully.