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Aerospace Nuclear Science & Technology
Organized to promote the advancement of knowledge in the use of nuclear science and technologies in the aerospace application. Specialized nuclear-based technologies and applications are needed to advance the state-of-the-art in aerospace design, engineering and operations to explore planetary bodies in our solar system and beyond, plus enhance the safety of air travel, especially high speed air travel. Areas of interest will include but are not limited to the creation of nuclear-based power and propulsion systems, multifunctional materials to protect humans and electronic components from atmospheric, space, and nuclear power system radiation, human factor strategies for the safety and reliable operation of nuclear power and propulsion plants by non-specialized personnel and more.
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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
Jiankai Yu, Hyunsuk Lee, Hanjoo Kim, Peng Zhang, Deokjung Lee
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 5 | May 2020 | Pages 728-742
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1677107
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The coupled neutronics–thermal-hydraulic simulation of the Benchmark for Evaluation and Validation of Reactor Simulations (BEAVRS) Cycle 1 depletion has been performed by the Monte Carlo–based multiphysics coupling code system MCS/CTF. MCS/CTF is a cyclewise pi-card iteration-based inner-coupling code system that couples the subchannel thermal-hydraulic code CTF as a thermal-hydraulic solver in the Monte Carlo neutron transport code MCS. MCS has been developed by the Computational Reactor Physics and Experiment Lab group at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology for the full-core analysis of large-scale commercial light water reactors with high fidelity at the engineering level. With the high-fidelity performance of MCS, the quarter-core pinwise depletion simulation for the BEAVRS Cycle 1 benchmark has been conducted with thermal-hydraulic feedback including fuel temperature, coolant temperature, and coolant density. Moreover, the MCS internal one-dimensional thermal-hydraulic solver TH1D (MCS/TH1D) has been utilized as the reference. On one hand, the simulated results of the criticality boron concentration and axially integrated assemblywise detector signals were compared with measured data. On the other hand, the comparisons of power, fuel temperature, coolant temperature, and density are also presented in this paper.
