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Division Spotlight
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.
Meeting Spotlight
Conference on Nuclear Training and Education: A Biennial International Forum (CONTE 2023)
February 6–9, 2023
Amelia Island, FL|Omni Amelia Island Resort
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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
February 2023
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
January 2023
Latest News
Nuclear energy: enabling production of food, fiber, hydrocarbon biofuels, and negative carbon emissions
In the 1960s, Alvin Weinberg at Oak Ridge National Laboratory initiated a series of studies on nuclear agro-industrial complexes1 to address the needs of the world’s growing population. Agriculture was a central component of these studies, as it must be. Much of the emphasis was on desalination of seawater to provide fresh water for irrigation of crops. Remarkable advances have lowered the cost of desalination to make that option viable in countries like Israel. Later studies2 asked the question, are there sufficient minerals (potassium, phosphorous, copper, nickel, etc.) to enable a prosperous global society assuming sufficient nuclear energy? The answer was a qualified “yes,” with the caveat that mineral resources will limit some technological options. These studies were defined by the characteristic of looking across agricultural and industrial sectors to address multiple challenges using nuclear energy.
Chun-Yen Li, Kai Wang, Marco Pellegrini, Nejdet Erkan, Koji Okamoto
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 5 | May 2022 | Pages 843-859
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2021.1973181
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For the Japan Sodium-cooled Fast Reactor (JSFR), should the hypothesized core disruptive accident (CDA) happened, the in-vessel retention (IVR) will be the main target to achieve. In the heat-removal phase of the CDA, the debris bed will be piled up on the debris catcher. The capability of stable cooling and avoiding recriticality on the debris bed will be the main issues for achieving IVR. Previous studies have shown that the homogeneous debris bed can attain stable cooling and eliminate the probability of recriticality. Besides, self-leveling, which is a mechanism redistributing and flattening the debris bed by the natural circulation or vaporization from surrounding coolant, can further suppress the debris bed’s thickness to below the coolable thickness. However, in the real situation, the debris bed is composed of mixed-density debris particles. Hence, when these mixed-density debris particles start to redistribute due to self-leveling, the debris bed will form a heterogeneous density distribution. Under this scenario, the capability of coolability and the probability of recriticality could deviate from the previous study. Therefore, it is necessary to obtain a verified coupled model between the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and the discrete element method (DEM) to track the mixed-density debris particles’ movement under the phenomenon of self-leveling. In this paper, first, the experiments simulating self-leveling on the mixed-density particle bed are performed. Afterward, the random heavy particle movement’s experimental data are extracted and transformed into the statistics form as the benchmark materials. Finally, the CFD-DEM model is validated via a series of sensitivity studies. The verified CFD-DEM can be expected to simulate the self-leveling behavior on the mixed-density debris bed and the real reactor case.