ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
Standards Program
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Sep 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
October 2025
Nuclear Technology
September 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
IAEA again raises global nuclear power projections
Noting recent momentum behind nuclear power, the International Atomic Energy Agency has revised up its projections for the expansion of nuclear power, estimating that global nuclear operational capacity will more than double by 2050—reaching 2.6 times the 2024 level—with small modular reactors expected to play a pivotal role in this high-case scenario.
IAEA director general Rafael Mariano Grossi announced the new projections, contained in the annual report Energy, Electricity, and Nuclear Power Estimates for the Period up to 2050 at the 69th IAEA General Conference in Vienna.
In the report’s high-case scenario, nuclear electrical generating capacity is projected to increase to from 377 GW at the end of 2024 to 992 GW by 2050. In a low-case scenario, capacity rises 50 percent, compared with 2024, to 561 GW. SMRs are projected to account for 24 percent of the new capacity added in the high case and for 5 percent in the low case.
Nam-Il Tak, Min-Hwan Kim, Hong Sik Lim, Jae Man Noh
Nuclear Technology | Volume 177 | Number 3 | March 2012 | Pages 352-365
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT12-A13480
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For the thermal analysis and the design of a prismatic gas-cooled reactor, local analyses have been widely used by modeling a unit cell or single assembly instead of a whole-core geometry. In spite of the recent rapid development of the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technology, a whole-core CFD analysis for a prismatic reactor still requires tremendous computational expense and might be a heavy burden for designers desiring a large number of calculations with various design options.This paper provides a practical method for the whole-core thermal analysis of a prismatic gas-cooled reactor. The method combines the merits of CFD and system approaches in order to provide the detailed analysis without much computational expense. It solves the three-dimensional heat conduction equation for a solid as in a CFD code. On the other hand, one-dimensional conservation equations are adopted for a fluid as in a system code. With such a combination, a significant reduction in the computational expense, as well as reasonable accuracy, is achieved. In addition, the present method adopts the basic unit cell concept, which eliminates an elaborate grid generation process. Detailed geometries and materials of the prismatic fuel and reflector blocks are efficiently modeled using the basic unit cells.