ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
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Division Spotlight
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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
IAEA promoting nuclear energy with G20
The International Atomic Energy Agency launched a collaboration with the Group of 20 this week to highlight the key role that nuclear energy can play in achieving energy security and climate-change goals.
The aim of this first-of-its-kind partnership with G20—the world’s largest economic group—is to build momentum for nuclear power. This is the first time the IAEA has presented to G20 on issues relating to nuclear power.
Ian Porter, Travis W. Knight, Patrick Raynaud
Nuclear Technology | Volume 190 | Number 2 | May 2015 | Pages 174-182
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT14-100
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Nuclear reactor systems codes have the ability to model the system response in an accident scenario based on known initial conditions (ICs) at the onset of the transient. However, there has been a tendency for these codes to lack the detailed thermomechanical fuel rod response models needed for best-estimate prediction of fuel rod failure. Alternatively, the reverse can be said about fuel performance codes; they can lack the ability to capture and model the thermal-hydraulic (T-H) influence of adjacent fuel rods and the rod's location in the reactor core. This work analyzes the limitations in using fuel performance codes to represent in-reactor conditions as determined by full-core T-H codes. The codes used in this analysis are the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's steady-state fuel performance code FRAPCON-3.5 and T-H code TRACE-V5P3. In order to assess the impact of the limitations found in the codes, several modifications were made to all of the codes to improve code-to-code consistency. The modifications to the fuel performance code include adding the ability to model gamma-ray heating and providing realistic core coolant conditions. The T-H code modifications include adding the ability to model the fuel with axially varying burnup-dependent fuel and cladding dimensional changes and corrosion characteristics. The fuel in a Westinghouse four-loop pressurized water reactor was modeled to assess the impacts these modifications have on fuel performance and ICs for transient analysis. The results of this study show that current modeling assumptions (and limitations) can yield both conservative and nonconservative results on several important licensing criteria.