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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!
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NN Asks: What did you learn from ANS’s Nuclear 101?
Mike Harkin
When ANS first announced its new Nuclear 101 certificate course, I was excited. This felt like a course tailor-made for me, a transplant into the commercial nuclear world. I enrolled for the inaugural session held in November 2024, knowing it was going to be hard (this is nuclear power, of course)—but I had been working on ramping up my knowledge base for the past year, through both my employer and at a local college.
The course was a fast-and-furious roller-coaster ride through all the key components of the nuclear power industry, in one highly challenging week. In fact, the challenges the students experienced caught even the instructors by surprise. Thankfully, the shared intellectual stretch we students all felt helped us band together to push through to the end.
We were all impressed with the quality of the instructors, who are some of the top experts in the field. We appreciated not only their knowledge base but their support whenever someone struggled to understand a concept.
Azin Behdadi, John C. Luxat
Nuclear Technology | Volume 181 | Number 1 | January 2013 | Pages 157-169
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the 14th International Topical Meeting on Nuclear Reactor Thermal Hydraulics (NURETH-14) / Fission Reactors; Reactor Safety; Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A15764
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Heavy water moderator surrounding each fuel channel is one of the important safety features in CANDU reactors since it provides an in situ passive heat sink for the fuel in situations where other engineered means of heat removal from fuel channels have failed. In a critical-break loss-of-coolant-accident scenario, fuel cooling becomes severely degraded because of rapid flow reduction in the affected flow pass of the heat transport system. This can result in pressure tubes (PTs) experiencing significant heatup during early stages of the accident when coolant pressure is still high, thereby causing uniform thermal creep strain (ballooning) of the PT in contact with its calandria tube (CT). The contact of the hot PT with the CT causes rapid redistribution of stored heat from the PT to the CT and a large heat flux spike from the CT to the moderator fluid. For conditions where subcooling of the moderator fluid is low, this heat flux spike can cause dryout of the CT. This can detrimentally affect channel integrity if the CT postdryout temperature becomes sufficiently high to result in continued thermal creep strain deformation of both the PT and the CT. The focus of this work is to develop a mechanistic model to predict critical heat flux (CHF) on the CT surface following a contact with its PT. A COMSOL multiphysics model using a two-dimensional transient fluid-thermal analysis of the CT surface undergoing heatup is used to predict the flow and temperature profiles on the CT surface. A mechanistic CHF model is to be proposed based on a concept of wall dry patch formation, prevention of rewetting, and subsequent dry patch spreading.