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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
2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott 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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Latest News
High-temperature plumbing and advanced reactors
The use of nuclear fission power and its role in impacting climate change is hotly debated. Fission advocates argue that short-term solutions would involve the rapid deployment of Gen III+ nuclear reactors, like Vogtle-3 and -4, while long-term climate change impact would rely on the creation and implementation of Gen IV reactors, “inherently safe” reactors that use passive laws of physics and chemistry rather than active controls such as valves and pumps to operate safely. While Gen IV reactors vary in many ways, one thing unites nearly all of them: the use of exotic, high-temperature coolants. These fluids, like molten salts and liquid metals, can enable reactor engineers to design much safer nuclear reactors—ultimately because the boiling point of each fluid is extremely high. Fluids that remain liquid over large temperature ranges can provide good heat transfer through many demanding conditions, all with minimal pressurization. Although the most apparent use for these fluids is advanced fission power, they have the potential to be applied to other power generation sources such as fusion, thermal storage, solar, or high-temperature process heat.1–3
Meihua Zeng, Yong Song, Yunqing Bai, Minghuang Wang, Meisheng He, Jie Yu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 204 | Number 2 | November 2018 | Pages 238-247
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1469349
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The China lead-based research reactor (CLEAR-I) with 10 MW(thermal) will be built for the research of the accelerator-driven subcritical system (ADS) and lead-cooled fast reactor technology. Compared with other reactors, ADS has a spallation target placed in the reactor core center, which affects the refueling motion in the vessel. It is difficult to reach the fuel assemblies near the proton beam tube through the common vertical refueling gripper. In this technical note, a new cantilever-type and internal grasping gripper with defined refueling process was designed to handle all assemblies in CLEAR-I. The static and kinematics analyses of the gripper were carried out by ANSYS Workbench and MATLAB considering the influence of working in air and liquid metal. The structural and kinematic simulation results show that the design of the gripper is feasible for CLEAR-I. It provides an advanced refueling solution for the technical validation of ADS.
