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Division Spotlight
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
Meeting Spotlight
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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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
E. Masiello, F. Filiciotto, S. Lapuerta-Cochet, R. Lenain
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 9 | September 2023 | Pages 2404-2424
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2175583
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work presents an asymptotic method based on angular flux expansion in a Neumann series. The technique is aimed at effective reduction of the memory imprint of numerical methods based on collision probabilities (CPs). The asymptotic method has been implemented in the heterogeneous Cartesian cells of the integro-differential transport solver (IDT). The IDT solves the neutral-particle transport equation by discrete ordinates combined with angular-dependent CP matrices. In lattice depletion calculations, because of the change of isotopic concentration along the burnup, methods based on CP discretization, such as current-coupling CP or the one presented in this paper, would require construction and storage of a set of CP coefficients for any depleted pin cell. When the number of media grows, the performances of the solver are bounded by the memory pressure caused by the growth of coefficients. Application of the asymptotic technique, presented in this paper, transforms by two user’s parameters the memory-bound solver in a compute-bound application, where the principal workload is transferred from coefficients to source iterations. In this work, a theoretical study of the method is presented together with two applications to two-dimensional assembly simulations. The effects on self-shielded and depleted materials are highlighted. Preliminary results show an encouraging reduction of memory occupation by a factor 10 without any significant loss of accuracy.