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Materials Science & Technology
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2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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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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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
Yoshikazu Tamauchi, Takashi Kodama, Naoya Sato, Keita Saito, Takahiro Chikazawa
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 4 | April 2023 | Pages 622-635
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2130659
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
As an explosion of radiolitically generated hydrogen is listed as a type of severe accident in the new regulation for nuclear fuel cycle facilities, it is important to evaluate the realistic source term of this type of accident. The airborne release fraction (ARF) is a key parameter in evaluating the source term of a hydrogen explosion. Therefore, a pressurization experiment and a hydrogen explosion experiment that induced a hydrogen explosion have been performed. As a result, the ARFs obtained from the pressurization experiment and hydrogen explosion experiment were approximately 1 × 10−5 and 1 × 10−6, respectively. There was no marked difference in the pressure dependency and liquid droplet particle size between the pressurization and hydrogen explosion experiments.