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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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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NRC nominee Nieh commits to independent safety mission
During a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing today, Ho Nieh, President Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as a commissioner at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, was urged to maintain the agency’s independence regardless of political pressure from the Trump administration.
Ruihan Li, Junyi Chen, Aixin Zhu, Jingang Liang, Ding She, Hongjian Zhang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 11 | November 2025 | Pages 1954-1970
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2025.2471712
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Simulating pebble bed reactors with high fidelity presents significant challenges because of the intricate geometry of the randomly packed pebbles and the requirement for multiphysics coupling. This study introduces an innovative modeling framework that couples neutronics, thermal hydraulics, and pebble flow dynamics of the reactor core. The Monte Carlo (MC) code, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method, and discrete element method (DEM) are used, utilizing the open-source codes OpenMC, OpenFOAM, and LAMMPS, respectively. The core geometry is explicitly constructed for both the MC and the DEM models, while a porous media approach is adopted for the CFD model to manage computational expenses. Enhancements have been made to OpenMC to facilitate data exchange: The core geometry is allowed to change between depletion steps to simulate pebble motion, and a temperature mesh scheme has been developed for efficient temperature distribution transfer. Validations are provided for the models and modifications implemented in this study. As a practical demonstration, a depletion simulation on a full-core model of a High-Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor–Pebble-Bed Module (HTR-PM) is conducted, explicitly modeling 420 000 randomly packed fuel pebbles. The results reveal detailed distributions of power, temperature, and burnup, all consistent with expected physical behavior, underscoring the effectiveness of our approach.