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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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NC State celebrates 70 years of nuclear engineering education
An early picture of the research reactor building on the North Carolina State University campus. The Department of Nuclear Engineering is celebrating the 70th anniversary of its nuclear engineering curriculum in 2020–2021. Photo: North Carolina State University
The Department of Nuclear Engineering at North Carolina State University has spent the 2020–2021 academic year celebrating the 70th anniversary of its becoming the first U.S. university to establish a nuclear engineering curriculum. It started in 1950, when Clifford Beck, then of Oak Ridge, Tenn., obtained support from NC State’s dean of engineering, Harold Lampe, to build the nation’s first university nuclear reactor and, in conjunction, establish an educational curriculum dedicated to nuclear engineering.
The department, host to the 2021 ANS Virtual Student Conference, scheduled for April 8–10, now features 23 tenure/tenure-track faculty and three research faculty members. “What a journey for the first nuclear engineering curriculum in the nation,” said Kostadin Ivanov, professor and department head.
Joel A. Kulesza
Nuclear Technology | Volume 175 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 228-237
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the 16th Biennial Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division / Radiation Transport and Protection | dx.doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A12294
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the computational fluid dynamics analysis to determine the necessary cooling airflow rates in the reactor cavity of a nuclear power plant during operation, the heat generated in the sacrificial bioshield and adjacent components is a significant source term. Traditionally, a three-dimensional (3-D) flux synthesis method is used to calculate the heat generation rate in the bioshield for reactors with a cylindrical reactor cavity because there is minimal azimuthal variation. However, the AP1000™ reactor incorporates an octagonal reactor cavity design with 12 ex-core detectors, leading to potentially significant impacts on the azimuthal heat generation rate distribution. Therefore, it was of interest to benchmark the traditional flux synthesis method with full 3-D discrete ordinates methods. Because of an uncertainty in the amount of mesh refinement necessary to have confidence in the results, a sensitivity study on the mesh refinement was performed with a parallel 3-D discrete ordinates code. This allowed a comparison with an industry-standard serial 3-D discrete ordinates code in terms of both execution speed and calculated results.The results suggest that for angular positions where the flux synthesis method incorporates an axial model, there is relatively good agreement with 3-D methods (within ±20%). In areas remote from axial models, there are differences of up to a factor of 2 in a nonconservative direction. Furthermore, a recently developed parallel 3-D discrete ordinates radiation transport code was shown to produce results generally consistent with the industry-standard 3-D code used (within 2.5%). Finally, the parallel code completed its calculations in 10% of the time required by the serial code for an identically sized problem.