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
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
Meeting Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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
August 2025
Nuclear Technology
July 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
NextGen MURR Working Group established in Missouri
The University of Missouri’s Board of Curators has created the NextGen MURR Working Group to serve as a strategic advisory body for the development of the NextGen MURR (University of Missouri Research Reactor).
Elia Merzari, Hisashi Ninokata, Sheng Wang, Emilio Baglietto
Nuclear Technology | Volume 165 | Number 3 | March 2009 | Pages 313-320
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A4104
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The present work considers simulation of free-surface vortices by means of computational fluid dynamics. The issue is relevant for the design of sodium-cooled fast breeder reactors (FBRs). In fact, the eventual entrainment of gas in the reactor core of an FBR may cause abnormal operation condition because of disturbed reactivity.The foci of this work are turbulence modeling and free-surface modeling. Two different approaches are tested in the benchmark case of Moriya et al.: single-phase simulation (through large eddy simulation and detached eddy simulation methodology) and two-phase simulation (combining a volume-of-fluid method with turbulence modeling). Results are in excellent agreement with the experiment for the circumferential velocity in both cases if the grid adopted is sufficiently fine near the vortex core. Through additional grid refinement it is possible to correctly reproduce the shape of the vortex dimple. The code employed is STAR-CD 4.0.