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Division Spotlight
Young Members Group
The Young Members Group works to encourage and enable all young professional members to be actively involved in the efforts and endeavors of the Society at all levels (Professional Divisions, ANS Governance, Local Sections, etc.) as they transition from the role of a student to the role of a professional. It sponsors non-technical workshops and meetings that provide professional development and networking opportunities for young professionals, collaborates with other Divisions and Groups in developing technical and non-technical content for topical and national meetings, encourages its members to participate in the activities of the Groups and Divisions that are closely related to their professional interests as well as in their local sections, introduces young members to the rules and governance structure of the Society, and nominates young professionals for awards and leadership opportunities available to members.
Meeting Spotlight
2023 ANS Winter Conference and Expo
November 12–15, 2023
Washington, D.C.|Washington Hilton
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Sep 2023
Jul 2023
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
October 2023
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
National Museum of Nuclear Science and History explores “atomic” culture
For many of us, the toys of our childhood leave indelible marks on our consciousness, affecting our long-term perceptions and attitudes about certain things. Hot Wheels may inspire a lifelong fascination with fast, flashy automobiles, while Barbies might shape ideas about beauty and self-image. For the generation who grew up during the Atomic Age—the post–World War II era from roughly the mid-1940s to the early 1960s—the toys, games, and entertainment of their childhoods might have included things like atomic pistols, atomic trains, rings with tiny amounts of radioactive elements, and comic books, puzzles, and music about nuclear weapons.
Hiroshi Madokoro, Takuya Yamashita, Xiaoyang Gaus-Liu, Thomas Cron, Beatrix Fluhrer, Ikken Sato, Shinya Mizokami
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 2 | February 2023 | Pages 144-168
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2121545
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Since the reactor pressure vessel (RPV) lower head failure determines the subsequent ex-vessel accident progression, it is a key issue to understanding the accident progression of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station (1F). The RPV failure is largely affected by thermal loads on the vessel wall, and thus, it is inevitable that the thermal behavior of the molten metallic pool with the co-existence of solid oxide fuel debris must be understood. In past decades, numerous experiments have been conducted to investigate homogeneous molten pool behavior. Few experiments, however, address the melting and heat transfer process of the debris bed consisting of materials with different melting temperatures. The LIVE-J2 experiment aims to provide experimental data on a solid-liquid mixture pool in a simulated RPV lower head under various conditions. The experiment was performed in the LIVE-3D facility at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. The LIVE-J2 experiment started from the end state of the previous LIVE-J1 experiment where a eutectic binary mixture of KNO3-NaNO3 (nitrate) was solidified and filled the gap of the ceramic beads inside the LIVE-vessel.
The information obtained in the LIVE-J2 experiment includes transient and steady-state melting temperature and vessel wall temperature distributions. The extensive measurements of the melting temperature indicate the heat transfer regimes in a solid-liquid mixture pool. The test results showed that the conductive heat transfer is dominant during steady state along the vessel wall boundary and that convective heat transfer takes place inside the mixture pool. After the addition of liquid nitrate on top of the mixture pool, different behavior was observed in each layer. In the upper pure-liquid nitrate layer, convective heat transfer was well developed, resulting in a homogeneous temperature, while within the lower solid/liquid debris mixture zone a large temperature gradient was observed, suggesting that conductive heat transfer was dominant. Besides the experimental performance, the test case was numerically simulated using Ansys Fluent. The simulation results generally agree with the measured experimental data. The flow regime and transient melt evolution were able to be estimated by the calculated velocity field and the crust thickness, respectively.
