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Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
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2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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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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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
Wei Ding, Eckhard Krepper, Uwe Hampel
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 1 | January-February 2019 | Pages 23-32
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1496693
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this work, we report on the development of a time-averaged Eulerian multiphase approach applied in the wall boiling process especially in the forced convective boiling process. Recently, in order to obtain accurate bubble dynamics and reduce case dependency, a single bubble model for nucleate boiling based on known published models was developed. The model considers geometry change and dynamic contact and inclination angles during bubble growth. The model has good agreement with experiments. However, the predicted bubble dynamics is dependent on the wall superheat (cavity activation temperature). This single bubble model requires an update of the current nucleation site activation and heat flux partitioning models in time-averaged Eulerian multiphase approaches. In this work, we will introduce this implementation in detail. Further, with help of the MUSIG (MUltiple SIze Group) model and a breakup and coalescence model, the time-averaged Eulerian approach could simulate the bubble size distribution in a heated pipe. With the necessary calibration of the nucleation site density, the comparisons between the calculation results and Bartolomei et al.’s experiments demonstrate the success of the implementation and the accuracy of this approach.