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Division Spotlight
Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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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Latest News
Dragonfly, a Pu-fueled drone heading to Titan, gets key NASA approval
Curiosity landed on Mars sporting a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) in 2012, and a second NASA rover, Perseverance, landed in 2021. Both are still rolling across the red planet in the name of science. Another exploratory craft with a similar plutonium-238–fueled RTG but a very different mission—to fly between multiple test sites on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon—recently got one step closer to deployment.
On April 25, NASA and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) announced that the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s icy moon passed its critical design review. “Passing this mission milestone means that Dragonfly’s mission design, fabrication, integration, and test plans are all approved, and the mission can now turn its attention to the construction of the spacecraft itself,” according to NASA.
W. James Boatwright, David W. Hiltbrand, Whee G. Choe
Nuclear Technology | Volume 121 | Number 3 | March 1998 | Pages 289-294
Technical Paper | RETRAN | doi.org/10.13182/NT98-A2840
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
TU Electric has developed and obtained U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) approval of the methodologies required to support core reload safety analyses. The Electric Power Research Institute-sponsored computer codes RETRAN-02 and VIPRE-01 are used in the non-loss-of-coolant-accident thermal-hydraulic analyses. These methods were employed to support the loading of the core of the Comanche Peak Steam Electric Station, Unit 1 (CPSES-1), Cycle 5.An overview of the reload safety analysis development effort is provided, with the focus on the qualification of the system transient analysis methodologies. Interactions with the NRC are described. Included is a discussion of the types of questions asked by the NRC and the corresponding TU Electric responses. Comparisons of calculated results to actual plant data which demonstrate the validity of the CPSES plant model, are provided. The importance of performing "good" benchmark comparisons is addressed as it relates to the demonstration of technical competence in the use and interpretation of RETRAN.The effectiveness of the approach used by TU Electric to obtain NRC approval of the reload safety analysis methodology is examined in retrospect. Finally, an assessment is made of the benefits, tangible and intangible, derived from having an in-house reload safety analysis capability.
