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.
Division Spotlight
Decommissioning & Environmental Sciences
The mission of the Decommissioning and Environmental Sciences (DES) Division is to promote the development and use of those skills and technologies associated with the use of nuclear energy and the optimal management and stewardship of the environment, sustainable development, decommissioning, remediation, reutilization, and long-term surveillance and maintenance of nuclear-related installations, and sites. The target audience for this effort is the membership of the Division, the Society, and the public at large.
Meeting Spotlight
2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott 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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Jun 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
July 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Smarter waste strategies: Helping deliver on the promise of advanced nuclear
At COP28, held in Dubai in 2023, a clear consensus emerged: Nuclear energy must be a cornerstone of the global clean energy transition. With electricity demand projected to soar as we decarbonize not just power but also industry, transport, and heat, the case for new nuclear is compelling. More than 20 countries committed to tripling global nuclear capacity by 2050. In the United States alone, the Department of Energy forecasts that the country’s current nuclear capacity could more than triple, adding 200 GW of new nuclear to the existing 95 GW by mid-century.
Rafael Macian, Paul Coddington, Paul Stangroom
Nuclear Technology | Volume 142 | Number 1 | April 2003 | Pages 47-63
Technical Paper | RETRAN | doi.org/10.13182/NT03-A3373
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Subcooled and saturated nucleate boiling are important physical processes in boiling water reactors (BWRs) under operating and transient conditions and in pressurized water reactors (PWRs) under transient conditions. Good predictions of such processes by system codes such as RETRAN-3D are, therefore, important from a safety and operational point of view.For this reason, and continuing the validation efforts carried out in the STARS Project at Paul Scherrer Institute, data from experiments in a uniformly heated tube carried out by Bartolomey et al. have been used to assess the subcooled and saturated nucleate boiling models in RETRAN-3D. These experiments were performed at high (~15-MPa) and medium (~7-, 4-, and 3-MPa) pressures. The heat flux (2210 to 420 kW/m2) and mass flux (2123 to 405 kg/s m2) were selected to cover a range of values spanning operating and transient situations in both BWRs and PWRs.This paper reports on the results obtained with both the four- and five-equation RETRAN-3D flow models. The results show that both models used in RETRAN-3D provide good estimates of subcooled and saturated nucleate boiling in heated tubes. The four-equation model, which makes use of the Electric Power Research Institute void fraction profile fitting model for the reactivity feedback only, shows the best performance for high mass fluxes, whereas the five-equation model, which directly computes the vaporization rate, performs better at low mass fluxes and relatively high heat fluxes.In addition to the results from RETRAN-3D, results obtained with the system code RELAP-5 are included in the plots and used to support the conclusions and to perform a comparative analysis of the methods used by the codes.
