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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 8–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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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Latest News
NextEra and Google ink a deal to restart Duane Arnold
A day anticipated by many across the nuclear community has finally arrived: NextEra Energy has officially announced its plans to restart Iowa’s only nuclear power plant, the Duane Arnold Energy Center.
Cody J. Permann, Andrea M. Jokisaari, Michael R. Tonks, Daniel Schwen, Derek R. Gaston, Fande Kong, Robert Hiromoto, Richard C. Martineau
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 7 | July 2021 | Pages 885-904
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1843893
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The ability to identify features within finite element simulations and track them over time is necessary for understanding and quantifying complex behaviors as disparate as turbulent vortices in a flow field to microstructure evolution. We extend our previous research on feature identification in parallel unstructured meshes with the novel ability to maintain feature distinctness by dynamically remapping individual features to new simulation variables as the simulation evolves. We utilize this capability to drastically reduce the number of variables required in a simulation while maintaining the same fidelity as simulations without these reductions. We present this novel remapping algorithm and the corresponding implementation within the open-source Multiphysics Object Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE) framework. We demonstrate the utility of the method with a novel phase-field model of irradiation-driven grain subdivision in UO2. Grain population statistics are tracked over time, and a dynamically stable population of grains with a reduced size evolves. These results indicate that the small grain sizes observed in high-burnup UO2 can be explained by this mechanism.