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Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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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Can hydrogen be the transportation fuel in an otherwise nuclear economy?
Let’s face it: The global economy should be powered primarily by nuclear power. And it probably will by the end of this century, with a still-significant assist from renewables and hydro. Once nuclear systems are dominant, the costs come down to where gas is now; and when carbon emissions are reduced to a small portion of their present state, it will become obvious that most other sources are only good in niche settings. I mean, why use small modular reactors to load-follow when they can just produce that power instead of buffering it?
Sheng Zhang, Xiaodong Sun
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 11 | November 2020 | Pages 1721-1739
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1749481
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Molten salts have been proposed as heat transfer media due to their superior thermal performance at elevated temperatures. A number of heat transfer correlations have been proposed in the literature for molten salts without explicitly considering the radiative heat transfer effect in the salts, which may not be negligible. This study therefore attempts to (1) quantitatively analyze the convective and radiative heat transfer of molten salts using an overall heat transfer model that includes a radiative heat transfer model developed in this research and an existing conventional convective heat transfer model/correlation, such as the Sieder-Tate or Hausen correlation, and (2) provide rationale on under what conditions it is necessary to consider the radiative heat transfer effect in salts. A parametric study was performed using the radiative heat transfer model developed to investigate the effects of various input variables, including the tube size (inner diameter 5 to 50 mm), salt temperature (500°C to 1000°C), salt and wall temperature difference (5°C to 100°C), and salt absorption coefficient (1 to 100 m-1). Our study indicates that (1) the proposed overall heat transfer model reasonably predicts the salt convective and radiative heat transfer, (2) the radiative heat transfer is more important for laminar flows than transitional and turbulent flows, (3) the radiative heat transfer is more important in tubes of larger inner diameter, (4) the salt temperature affects the radiative heat transfer significantly while the temperature difference between the salt and wall has a slightly smaller effect for the range investigated (ΔT = 5°C to 100°C), and (5) the salt absorption coefficient significantly affects the salt radiative heat transfer.