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Division Spotlight
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.
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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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
Xianfei Wen, Andreas Enqvist
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 11 | November 2019 | Pages 1480-1487
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1603503
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Cs2LiYCl6:Ce3+ (CLYC) scintillator is being widely employed in nuclear physics, planetary science, radiation environmental monitoring, nuclear security, and nonproliferation communities. The time resolution of a 1 × 1-in. CLYC scintillation detector is reported in this paper. It was measured by the use of a high sampling rate DRS4 waveform digitizer and an EJ-309 liquid scintillation detector. The digitizer was first characterized with regard to its intrinsic time resolution and then the time resolution of the EJ-309 detector was investigated. It served as a reference detector in the time resolution measurements for the CLYC detector. The time pick-off techniques used were the constant fraction discrimination and leading edge discrimination methods. In addition, the Savitzky-Golay filter was used to further improve the measured time resolutions. This filter was shown to be an effective approach to improving time resolution when the signal-to-noise ratio is low.
