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Division Spotlight
Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
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
NRC updating GEIS rule for new nuclear technology
The Nuclear Regulatory Agency is issuing a proposed generic environmental impact statement (GEIS) for use in reviewing applications for new nuclear reactors.
In an April 17 memo, NRC secretary Carrie Safford wrote that the commission approved NRC staff’s recommendation to publish in the Federal Register a proposed rule amending 10 CFR Part 51, “Environmental Protection Regulations for Domestic Licensing and Related Regulatory Functions.”
Francesco Ganda, Brent Dixon, Edward Hoffman, Taek K. Kim, Temitope Taiwo, Roald Wigeland
Nuclear Technology | Volume 193 | Number 2 | February 2016 | Pages 219-233
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NT14-113
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The purpose of this work is to present a new methodology and the associated computational tools developed within the U.S. Department of Energy Fuel Cycle Options Campaign to quantify the economic performance of complex nuclear fuel cycles. The levelized electricity cost at the busbar is generally chosen to quantify and compare the economic performance of different base load–generating technologies, including nuclear; the levelized electricity cost is the cost that renders the risk-adjusted discounted net present value of the investment cash flow equal to zero. The work presented here is focused on the calculation of the levelized cost of electricity of fuel cycles at mass balance equilibrium, which is termed levelized cost of electricity at equilibrium (LCAE). To alleviate the computational issues associated with the calculation of the LCAE for complex fuel cycles, a novel approach has been developed. This approach has been termed the island approach because of its logical structure, in which a generic complex fuel cycle is subdivided into subsets of fuel cycle facilities called islands, each containing one and only one type of reactor or blanket and an arbitrary number of fuel cycle facilities. A nuclear economic software tool, NE-COST, written in the commercial programming software MATLAB®, has been developed to calculate the LCAE of complex fuel cycles with the island computational approach. NE-COST has also been developed with the capability to handle uncertainty: the input parameters (both unit costs and fuel cycle characteristics) can have uncertainty distributions associated with them, and the output can be computed in terms of probability density functions of the LCAE. In this paper, NE-COST will be used to quantify, as examples, the economic performance of (a) once-through systems of current light water reactors (LWRs), (b) continuous plutonium recycling in fast reactors (FRs) with drivers and blankets, and (c) recycling of plutonium bred in FRs into LWRs. For each fuel cycle, the contributions to the total LCAE of the main cost components will be identified.