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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Latest News
Senate EPW Committee to hold Nieh nomination hearing
Nieh
The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will hold a nomination hearing Wednesday for Ho Nieh, President Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as commission at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Trump nominated Nieh on July 30 to serve as NRC commissioner the remainder of a term that will expire June 30, 2029, as Nuclear NewsWire previously reported.
Nieh has been vice president of regulatory affairs at Southern Nuclear since 2021, though since June 2024 he has been at the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations as a loaned executive.
A return to the NRC: If confirmed by the Senate, Nieh would be returning to the NRC after three previous stints totaling nearly 20 years.
Ragai Altamimi, Mohamed S. El-Genk
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 198 | Number 6 | June 2024 | Pages 1320-1346
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2249782
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To support the development of Generation IV nuclear reactors, in-pile and out-of-pile test loops with miniature, submersible direct-current electromagnetic pumps (DC-EMPs) are used to investigate compatibility and corrosion issues of nuclear fuel and structure materials with flowing molten lead and alkali liquid metals. Owing to the absence of detailed experimental measurements and because of its simplicity and low computational cost, the equivalent circuit model (ECM) is widely used to predict the pump characteristics. The simplifying assumptions in the ECM contribute to overpredicting the pump characteristics by >10%. To gain insight into the pump operation and assess the effect of various assumptions in ECM, not possible even experimentally, this work performed three-dimensional (3-D), magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) analyses of a 66.8-mm-diameter, submersible, dual-stage DC-EMP, recently developed by the authors, for circulating molten Pb and liquid Na at up to 500°C. The solution of the coupled electromagnetism equations and the momentum and energy balance equations calculates the pump characteristics and provides 3-D images of the flow, electric current, and magnetic field strength distributions in the flow duct. The grid convergence index (GCI) criterion confirmed the adequacy of the employed numerical mesh refinement and the results conversion. Results demonstrate strong dependence of the magnetic field strength distribution in the flow duct on the value and the distribution of the electric current but negligible effects of the fluid temperature on joule heating and pump characteristics. The Lorentz force highest densities occur at the entrance of the two pumping stages, and approximately 10.0% of the total force occurs in the fringe regions upstream and downstream of pumping stages. The MHD pump characteristics are in general agreement with, but consistently lower than, the ECM predictions. For molten lead and liquid sodium, the difference between the calculated characteristics increases with increased flow rate and input current, up to 12% and 14%, respectively.
