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The division was organized to promote the advancement of knowledge of the use of particle accelerator technologies for nuclear and other applications. It focuses on production of neutrons and other particles, utilization of these particles for scientific or industrial purposes, such as the production or destruction of radionuclides significant to energy, medicine, defense or other endeavors, as well as imaging and diagnostics.
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2025 ANS Annual Conference
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Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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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
Andrej Prošek, Boštjan Končar, Matjaž Leskovar
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 12 | December 2019 | Pages 1661-1674
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1562820
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Prediction of highly turbulent flows using the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools is not an easy task. Besides the uncertainty in the choice of turbulence model parameters, the physical properties of the fluid and experimental boundary conditions also can be largely affected by uncertainties. The objective of the study is uncertainty quantification of CFD simulation to obtain figures of merits, downstream velocity, and turbulence kinetic energy. The water-mixing experiment in the GEneric MIxing Experiment (GEMIX) facility performed at Paul Scherrer Institute is used as a benchmark case. The NEPTUNE_CFD code that solves Reynolds-averaged Navier Stokes equations with k-eps turbulence model has been used to perform a series of simulations. For uncertainty quantification with the Monte Carlo method the Optimal Statistical Estimator (OSE) was used for response surface (RS) generation from the set of CFD calculations. The results of the uncertainty analysis show that OSE is a very suitable method for RS generation, which is then used in uncertainty analysis using the Monte Carlo method to determine the 5% lower limit and 95% upper limit with 95% confidence level. In this way, the impact of some sources of uncertainty is evaluated. Also, OSE can reproduce the CFD simulation with high accuracy at the CFD calculation points, even in the case when only 5 out of 40 calculation points are used for RS generation. The results further suggest that it is very important to perform accurate reference calculation and select appropriate ranges of variation for uncertain input parameters.