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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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U.S. nuclear supply chain: Ready for liftoff
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
This month, September 8–11, the American Nuclear Society is teaming up with the Nuclear Energy Institute to host our first-ever Nuclear Energy Conference and Expo—NECX for short—in Atlanta. This new meeting combines ANS’s Utility Working Conference and NEI’s Nuclear Energy Assembly to form what NEI CEO Maria Korsnick and I hope will be the premier nuclear industry gathering in America.
We did this because after more than four decades of relative stagnation, the U.S. nuclear supply chain is finally entering a new era of dynamic growth. This resurgence is being driven by several powerful and increasingly durable forces: the explosive demand for electricity from artificial intelligence and data centers, an unprecedented wave of public and private acceptance of—and investment in—advanced nuclear technologies, and a strong market signal for reliable, on-demand power. Add the recent Trump administration executive orders on nuclear into the mix, and you have all the makings of an accelerant-rich business environment primed for rapid expansion.
Taisuke Yonomoto, Yutaka Kukita, Richard R. Schultz
Nuclear Technology | Volume 124 | Number 1 | October 1998 | Pages 18-30
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT98-A2906
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The passive residual heat removal (PRHR) system in the Westinghouse AP600 advanced passive reactor design is a natural-circulation-driven heat exchanger cooled by the water in the in-containment refueling water storage tank (IRWST). During the experiments, which simulated small-break loss-of-coolant accidents in the AP600 reactor using the ROSA-V Large-Scale Test Facility (LSTF), the PRHR system heat removal rates well exceeded the core decay power soon after the actuation of the PRHR. This resulted in continuous cooldown and depressurization of the primary side. The PRHR heat transfer performance in these experiments was analyzed by applying heat transfer correlations available in literature to the PRHR heat exchanger tube bundle. Also, the three-dimensional natural circulation in the IRWST was simulated numerically using the FLUENT code. The total heat transfer rate of the PRHR was predicted within 5% of the measured value. The fluid temperature distribution in the IRWST was also predicted well except that the elevation of the thermally stratified region was underpredicted. The calculated flow pattern in the IRWST suggests that the atypical IRWST geometry in the LSTF may have affected the PRHR heat transfer performance during the experiments only a little.