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
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
Mar 2026
Jul 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
March 2026
Nuclear Technology
February 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
April 2026
Latest News
NRC approves TerraPower construction permit
Today, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that it has approved TerraPower’s construction permit application for Kemmerer Unit 1, the company’s first deployment of Natrium, its flagship sodium fast reactor.
This approval is a significant milestone on three fronts. For TerraPower, it represents another step forward in demonstrating its technology. For the Department of Energy, it reflects progress (despite delays) for the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program (ARDP). For the NRC, it is the first approval granted to a commercial reactor in nearly a decade—and the first approval of a commercial non–light water reactor in more than 40 years.
Yassin A. Hassan
Nuclear Technology | Volume 69 | Number 3 | June 1985 | Pages 257-267
Technical Paper | Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT85-A33609
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Three-dimensional fluid and thermal mixing analysis of a full-scale cold leg and downcomer of a Babcock & Wilcox-designed pressurized water reactor is performed. The impetus of the present study is to provide an accurate estimation of the local fluid temperatures in the cold leg and downcomer when the cold high-pressure safety fluid is injected into the cold leg carrying a hot fluid. Such temperature predictions are needed in resolving the so-called pressurized thermal shock issue in the nuclear industry. The unique feature of this study is the use of the accurate mass-flow-weighted skew-upwind scheme to approximate the convective transport terms in the COMMIX-1A code approximation of the fluid energy equation. This new scheme is shown to considerably reduce the false diffusion that plagued multidimensional thermal-hydraulic applications. The computed fluid velocity patterns and temperature predictions have shown similar behavior to the flow visualization and temperature field measurements in scaled experiments.