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Division Spotlight
Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
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
Wade Marcum, Daniel LaBrier, Emory Brown, Colby Jensen, Yong-Joon Choi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 6 | June 2020 | Pages 911-923
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1713673
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The effort to perform transient (TR) testing of nuclear fuel and materials in the United States took an important step in 2017 with the resumption of operations at the Transient Reactor Test (TREAT) Facility at the Idaho National Laboratory. As part of this restart effort, a U.S. Department of Energy–funded grant was tasked with developing a set of computational and experimental benchmarks for prior TR activities in order to assess the capabilities of historically developed codes used to provide the safety case for experimental design and evaluation. One subset of tasks in this project was the development of an experimental facility—the Transient Reactor Test Loop (TRTL) Facility—that would emulate a pump-driven flowing water loop that would be implemented at the TREAT Facility for TR testing of light water reactor fuel. The TRTL Facility was designed and developed at Oregon State University and began operations testing in 2017. Empirical data produced by this new experimental flow loop was benchmarked against a set of codes that represent the standard for use in industrial [Reactor Excursion and Leak Analysis Program–Three Dimensional (RELAP5-3D)] and regulatory [TRAC/Reactor Excursion and Leak Analysis Program (RELAP) Advanced Computational Engine (TRACE)] settings. The findings from those benchmarking activities from the TRTL Facility and the comparisons with the established safety codes are presented here.