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Accelerator Applications
The division was organized to promote the advancement of knowledge of the use of particle accelerator technologies for nuclear and other applications. It focuses on production of neutrons and other particles, utilization of these particles for scientific or industrial purposes, such as the production or destruction of radionuclides significant to energy, medicine, defense or other endeavors, as well as imaging and diagnostics.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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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Glass strategy: Hanford’s enhanced waste glass program
The mission of the Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection (ORP) is to complete the safe cleanup of waste resulting from decades of nuclear weapons development. One of the most technologically challenging responsibilities is the safe disposition of approximately 56 million gallons of radioactive waste historically stored in 177 tanks at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
ORP has a clear incentive to reduce the overall mission duration and cost. One pathway is to develop and deploy innovative technical solutions that can advance baseline flow sheets toward higher efficiency operations while reducing identified risks without compromising safety. Vitrification is the baseline process that will convert both high-level and low-level radioactive waste at Hanford into a stable glass waste form for long-term storage and disposal.
Although vitrification is a mature technology, there are key areas where technology can further reduce operational risks, advance baseline processes to maximize waste throughput, and provide the underpinning to enhance operational flexibility; all steps in reducing mission duration and cost.
Rachel A. Shapiro, Massimiliano Fratoni
Nuclear Technology | Volume 194 | Number 1 | April 2016 | Pages 15-27
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NT15-97
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Fully ceramic microencapsulated (FCM) fuel consists of TRISO (tristructural-isotropic) fuel particles embedded in a ceramic matrix (SiC) to form fuel pellets and rods and offers improved fission product retention and lower operating temperature with expected superior performance in normal and off-normal conditions compared to conventional fuel. When coupled with SiC cladding, FCM fuel eliminates zirconium altogether and is expected to drastically reduce hydrogen generation during a beyond-design-basis accident. In order to be deployed in current or future pressurized water reactors (PWRs), FCM fuel must meet or exceed the neutronic performance of conventional fuel. Limited by low heavy metal loading, an FCM fuel assembly requires increased enrichment and large fuel rods to match the cycle length of a conventional fuel assembly.
This study investigated the core design, neutronics, and thermal hydraulics of a PWR loaded with FCM fuel and sought to optimize the assembly design to minimize the enrichment required to reach fuel performance similar to that of conventional fuel. It was found that the implementation of FCM fuel in a 17 × 17 assembly requires close to 20% enrichment and large fuel rods. Such design performs comparably to conventional fuel (4.5% enrichment) in terms of cycle length, reactivity coefficients, intra-assembly power peaking factor, burnable poison penalty, and control rod worth but requires an increase of pumping power. A parametric analysis spanned a large design space varying fuel outer diameter and pitch-to-diameter ratio (P/D) and downselected two alternate assembly designs: 11 × 11 (1.65-cm outer diameter and 1.18 P/D) and 9 × 9 (2.12-cm outer diameter and 1.12 P/D). These designs meet the cycle length requirement with 18.6% and 16.2% enrichments, respectively, but feature a smaller minimum departure from nucleate boiling ratio (MDNBR) compared to a reference assembly. It was estimated that a slight increase in rod outer diameter increases MDNBR to the desired level and implies a pressure drop increase of 10%.