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Division Spotlight
Human Factors, Instrumentation & Controls
Improving task performance, system reliability, system and personnel safety, efficiency, and effectiveness are the division's main objectives. Its major areas of interest include task design, procedures, training, instrument and control layout and placement, stress control, anthropometrics, psychological input, and motivation.
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
Linfeng Yan, Dawei Wang, Hsingtzu Wu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 12 | December 2022 | Pages 1822-1831
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2083750
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A passive residual heat removal system plays an important role in cooling the reactor core under accident conditions. The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software package ANSYS Fluent is used to analyze the influence of malfunction of any 2 of 12 tubes of a passive residual heat removal heat exchanger (PRHR HX) on its performance. Then the computation was validated using the published experimental data. Five different scenarios and a normal condition are computed to analyze the influence of locations of the malfunctioning tubes on the heat transfer performance of the PRHR HX. The results show that the tube defect reduces the amount of heat transferred by the PRHR HX. However, it is correlated with the size of the surface area of the deficient tubes instead of their locations. In other words, analysis suggests that defect tubes with the same surface area should result in similar damage regardless of the location.
