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Decommissioning & Environmental Sciences
The mission of the Decommissioning and Environmental Sciences (DES) Division is to promote the development and use of those skills and technologies associated with the use of nuclear energy and the optimal management and stewardship of the environment, sustainable development, decommissioning, remediation, reutilization, and long-term surveillance and maintenance of nuclear-related installations, and sites. The target audience for this effort is the membership of the Division, the Society, and the public at large.
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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
Afaque Shams, Dante De Santis, Adam Padee, Piotr Wasiuk, Tobiasz Jarosiewicz, Tomasz Kwiatkowski, Sławomir Potempski
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 2 | February 2020 | Pages 283-295
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1642683
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Large-scale computations play an important role in many engineering and scientific applications. In the nuclear field, in particular, the crucial need for accurate simulations and reliable reference data for validation purposes makes high-fidelity simulations an extremely important tool. Due to the too-large computational resources required, these simulations must be performed on dedicated computational facilities. This paper focuses on the description of the high-performance computing facility at the Świerk Computing Centre (CIŚ) in Poland. More specifically, the hardware configuration, software used for on-demand deployment of dedicated subclusters, and queuing systems are described. The computational capabilities at the CIŚ are assessed by performing scalability tests with the massive parallel code NEK5000. The tests assess the influence of the CPU architecture, cooling infrastructure, and interconnection performance on the solver running times. Subsequently, selected applications are presented. These applications concern the direct numerical simulations of mixed convection and fluid flow in a rod bundle. The mean velocity and temperature, the root mean square of the velocity components, and the novel results related to the budgets of turbulent kinetic energy as well the budgets of the wall-normal and streamwise turbulent heat flux are reported for different Prandtl numbers for the mixed convection case. For the rod bundle case an instantaneous temperature for the isothermal and isoflux boundary conditions is reported. Moreover, the frequency of the velocity pulsation has been computed.