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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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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.
J. W. Fricano, J. Buongiorno
Nuclear Technology | Volume 184 | Number 1 | October 2013 | Pages 63-77
Technical Paper | Fuel Design/Defects/Examination / Materials for Nuclear Fuels | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A19869
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A metal fuel performance code was coupled to a subchannel analysis code to predict, in a computationally efficient way, critical phenomena that could lead to pin failure for steady-state and transient scenarios in sodium-cooled fast reactors. The fuel performance and subchannel codes coupled are FEAST-METAL and an updated version of COBRA-IV-I, respectively. In coupling the codes, the importance of azimuthal temperature and stress effects in the fuel pin were analyzed; it was concluded that azimuthal temperature averaging around the fuel pin is an acceptable approximation. The codes were coupled using a wrapper, the COBRA And FEAST Executer (CAFE), written in the Python programming language. Data from EBR-II was used to confirm and verify CAFE. Finally, CAFE was used to predict the maximum allowable burnup of three different fuel assembly designs (driver fuel, radial blanket, and tight-pitch breed-and-burn fuel) as a function of operating temperature, linear power, fuel composition, cladding thickness, and smear density.