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Growth beyond megawatts
Hash Hashemianpresident@ans.org
When talking about growth in the nuclear sector, there can be a somewhat myopic focus on increasing capacity from year to year. Certainly, we all feel a degree of excitement when new projects are announced, and such announcements are undoubtedly a reflection of growth in the field, but it’s important to keep in mind that growth in nuclear has many metrics and takes many forms.
Nuclear growth—beyond megawatts—also takes the form of increasing international engagement. That engagement looks like newcomer countries building their nuclear sectors for the first time. It also looks like countries with established nuclear sectors deepening their connections and collaborations. This is one of the reasons I have been focused throughout my presidency on bringing more international members and organizations into the fold of the American Nuclear Society.
Kyle M. Ramey, Bojan Petrovic
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 11 | November 2025 | Pages 1934-1953
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2025.2464460
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Advanced High Temperature Reactor (AHTR) is a prismatic Fluoride salt cooled High temperature Reactor (FHR) fueled by TRISO particles with a relatively large power of 3400 MW(thermal). Because of its double heterogeneity in fuel element geometry and complexity to model it, transport simulations of AHTR have mostly focused on using Monte Carlo methods. Detailed depletion studies with elements of multiphysics have not been done previously on AHTR, which created the need for a new tool to do so. A C++ script was created to enable such analyses of AHTR, including temperature feedback, thermal expansion, material property changes, and criticality search on control rod position. This paper begins with a brief summary of modeling capabilities and methodologies. Then, attention turns to depletion analysis of AHTR. In this work, five depletion cases of varying degrees of resolution and features are considered with results and comparisons presented. Three-dimensional depletion cases include single material tracking (core average), fine spatial tracking (4032 zones), thermal-hydraulic feedback substeps between burnup steps, criticality iteration substeps via control rod movement between burnup steps, and use of both criticality and thermal-hydraulic iteration substeps between burnup steps. The final case illustrates the full functionality to run detailed depletion studies in an automated fashion with elements of multiphysics. Although only applicable to AHTR, the script enables analyses not previously possible with existing tools and advances the state of the art for AHTR core design.