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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Latest News
House E&C members question the DOE
As work progresses on the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Reactor Pilot Program, which will progress through DOE authorization rather than Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing, three members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce have sent a critical letter to Energy Secretary Chris Wright.
The letter demands “information about the DOE and its employees’ dealings with the NRC and its staff” and expresses concern that DOE staff has “broken the firewall” between the departments.
Hajime Furuichi, Kenichi Katono, Yuki Mizushima, Toshiyuki Sanada
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 11 | November 2023 | Pages 2950-2960
Regular Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2180986
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This study aims to improve the measurement accuracy of liquid film thickness using a liquid film sensor with an optical waveguide film (OWF). The measurement principle of employing the OWF is based on the detection of light reflection at the liquid film surface with high spatial resolution. Because the curved surface of the liquid film reflects light and increases measurement error, we propose a signal processing method to remove the error factor in the calculation of the time-averaged thickness. This method requires prediction of the surface curvature, and we numerically investigated the characteristics of the output signal related to the reflected light intensity. The analysis results showed that the effect of the curved surface up to the surface curvature of 5.0 mm−1 was negligible because the liquid film thickness showed good agreement with that of the flat liquid film surface within 7% accuracy. Furthermore, we consider the applicable range of liquid film thicknesses under the operating conditions of boiling water reactors (BWRs). We estimated the surface curvature of the liquid film based on the calculation of the critical Weber number and confirmed that the curvature caused under the BWR operating conditions was covered by the analysis conditions of this study. Therefore, our proposed method for signal processing via the OWF enabled us to improve the measurement accuracy of the time-averaged thickness with respect to the base film thickness by extracting accurate surface curvature data.