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Division Spotlight
Young Members Group
The Young Members Group works to encourage and enable all young professional members to be actively involved in the efforts and endeavors of the Society at all levels (Professional Divisions, ANS Governance, Local Sections, etc.) as they transition from the role of a student to the role of a professional. It sponsors non-technical workshops and meetings that provide professional development and networking opportunities for young professionals, collaborates with other Divisions and Groups in developing technical and non-technical content for topical and national meetings, encourages its members to participate in the activities of the Groups and Divisions that are closely related to their professional interests as well as in their local sections, introduces young members to the rules and governance structure of the Society, and nominates young professionals for awards and leadership opportunities available to members.
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
Imane Khalil, Quinn Pratt
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 7 | July 2019 | Pages 987-991
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1554026
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A MATLAB tool that combines computational fluid dynamics with uncertainty quantification (UQ) applied to a two-dimensional FLUENT computational model to predict the heat transfer and the maximum temperature inside a spent fuel assembly is presented in this technical note. The tool is used to establish a connection between MATLAB and ANSYS-FLUENT for the purpose of UQ using the Sandia National Laboratory’s UQ Toolkit. This tool allows users to adapt the UQ methodology to existing ANSYS-FLUENT models in order to automate the quadrature-based simulation process. The novelty of the tool presented in this technical note is its ability to generate results covering a continuous range of input parameters by using polynomial chaos expansions for the representation of random variables and the propagation of uncertainty in computational models.
