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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.
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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
Mustafa H. Almadih, T. Almudhhi, S. Ebrahim, A. Howell, G. R. Garrett, S. M. Bajorek, F. B. Cheung
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 8 | August 2022 | Pages 1290-1300
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2021.2000558
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this study, boiling regimes have been identified and analyzed along with the corresponding vapor-liquid interfacial morphologies and heat transfer behaviors during quenching of a heated rod using an acoustic measurement technique. The quenching experiments are performed by using cylindrical test samples that are embedded with thermocouples. The experimental work includes investigating the whole range of pool boiling regimes from film boiling through transition boiling to nucleate boiling using Python’s tools of signal processing. The boiling signals are recorded by a special hydrophone (i.e., the HTI-96-Min Exportable, High Tech, Inc.) to register the different sound waves generated by boiling under the water. This special hydrophone is capable of working in boiling water to record high- and low-frequency signals in subcooled pool boiling. The latter has many applications, such as the operations of advanced nuclear reactors, chemical processing, power generation, etc. In this work, the technique of signal processing is employed to identify the boiling regimes and to seek a new understanding of the boiling dynamics, particularly vapor-liquid interfacial morphologies, by applying a new tool for signal processing. Physically, each boiling regime should have a characteristic dominant acoustic signal that can be identified. By correlating the acoustic signatures with the boiling heat fluxes in various regimes, the minimum and maximum heat fluxes measured during the quenching of the cylindrical samples can be identified from the recorded acoustic signals during subcooled pool boiling.