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Division Spotlight
Isotopes & Radiation
Members are devoted to applying nuclear science and engineering technologies involving isotopes, radiation applications, and associated equipment in scientific research, development, and industrial processes. Their interests lie primarily in education, industrial uses, biology, medicine, and health physics. Division committees include Analytical Applications of Isotopes and Radiation, Biology and Medicine, Radiation Applications, Radiation Sources and Detection, and Thermal Power Sources.
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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Prepare for the 2025 PE Exam with ANS guides
The next opportunity to earn professional engineer (PE) licensure in nuclear engineering is this fall. Now is the time to sign up and begin studying with the help of materials like the online module program offered by the American Nuclear Society.
Lili Tong, Jie Zou, Jun Tao, Xuewu Cao
Nuclear Technology | Volume 191 | Number 1 | July 2015 | Pages 15-26
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT14-93
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the advanced passive pressurized water reactor, a passive containment cooling system (PCCS) has been adopted to cool the containment—comprising a cylindrical steel vessel—during postulated accidents, whereby the decay heat is removed through water film evaporating enhanced by air cooling outside the containment. In this study, an integrated safety analytical code is used to study the heat removal capacity of PCCS during severe accidents and its influence on severe accident management measures. The coupled analytical model includes the reactor cooling system, engineered safety features, containment system, and PCCS. Containment responses during typical design-basis accidents and integrated severe accident scenarios are calculated and validated using a design control document and probabilistic risk assessment, respectively. Four typical severe accident sequences that contribute to core damage frequency or containment high pressure are selected to evaluate the containment response. The results show that the containment pressure can be controlled at a relatively low level within 72 h with the heat removal by PCCS. Analysis of the effects of PCCS water cooling recovery during the late period of the accident sequence in severe accident management guidelines alerts as to the risk of hydrogen combustion after breaking the steam-inert atmosphere inside containment. Moreover, sensitivity analysis has been performed to study the influence of the water film coverage rate and environmental air temperature, and it shows that a decrease of the water film coverage rate and an increase of the environmental air temperature reduce the PCCS cooling capacity.