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A trip abroad
Hash Hashemian president@ans.org
In my August column in Nuclear News, I reflected on the importance of ANS’s annual conferences for bringing together our nuclear community at the national level. In September, after speaking at Tennessee’s Nuclear Opportunities Workshop, I focused my NN column that month on the value of state-level conferences.
Also in September, alongside ANS Executive Director/CEO Craig Piercy, I shifted my focus to another key front in nuclear collaboration, the international stage, by attending the General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.
The timing of the IAEA’s General Conference could not have been better; it took place the same week the U.S. and U.K. kicked off a new wave of transatlantic partnerships in the nuclear sector between both government and industry. This fortuitous overlapping gave us a timely and concrete reminder of international collaboration’s unparalleled benefits.
The General Conference was an expectedly busy event. To cover as much ground as possible, Piercy and I took turns attending either the U.S. delegation meetings with other countries or the General Assembly of the IAEA, where the American Nuclear Society has a seat among other critical nongovernmental organizations.
We listened to presentations by several of the 180 IAEA member states, including, of course, the United States. Aside from ANS, the U.S. presence at the conference included U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, NRC Chair David Wright, and DOE Assistant Secretary of Nuclear Energy Ted Garrish.
U.S. representation was further bolstered by an industry delegation that included 65 participants from 32 companies, many of whom used the opportunity to report progress on their plans for the international expansion of their nuclear fleets. Meetings of that industry delegation were coordinated by the Nuclear Energy Institute.
Aside from the main conference, Piercy and I also attended the embedded meetings of the International Nuclear Society Council. INSC exists to facilitate knowledge-sharing and collaboration between 18 different member nuclear societies from around the world.
The INSC meetings within the General Conference brought together the presidents and senior members of those societies to give presentations and explore new opportunities. I made a presentation on the state of nuclear in North America, covering the latest developments and deployments in the U.S. and Canada.
This presentation emphasized the new nuclear lift in the U.S. that is being heavily supported by the Trump administration. I recapped the four executive orders issued by President Trump in May, the recent momentum at the DOE, and how these changes are capitalizing on a broader groundswell in both industry development and public support.
I also pointed out the success of our neighbor Canada in progressing on the first water-cooled small modular reactor in North America using BWRX-300 technology, which was supplied by an American firm and international partners—a perfect symbol of the value of global nuclear collaboration.
In all, I have now represented ANS at the state, national, and international levels, gaining useful insight into the work that needs to be done at each. From this vantage point, it’s clear to me that the path forward from the country to the globe is to, above all else, keep working together and supporting each other to bring about the next age of nuclear.
Victor C. Leite, Elia Merzari, Roberto Ponciroli, Lander Ibarra
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 5 | May 2023 | Pages 645-666
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2151822
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this study, the capabilities of a physics-informed convolutional neural network (CNN) for reconstructing the temperature field from a limited set of measurements taken at the boundaries of internal flows are demonstrated. Such an approach enables the development of less invasive monitoring methods for real-time plant diagnostics. As a test case, a Molten Salt Fast Reactor (MSFR) design was selected. This circulating fuel reactor has received interest from both scientific and industrial communities due to its intrinsic safety and sustainability. Molten salt flows in such reactors, however, can present highly localized temperature peaks that can induce significant thermal stresses onto the vessel walls. At these local maxima, the salt temperature may exceed a thousand kelvins, which makes a direct measurement challenging or even unfeasible. The proposed CNN algorithm allows one to detect indirectly such discontinuities through an accurate, albeit indirect, temperature measurement method during reactor operation. The datasets employed to train and test the machine learning models in the present work were generated with Nek5000, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code developed at Argonne National Laboratory. The CNN algorithm is trained with CFD results that span a set of MSFR operational power and flow ranges. To demonstrate the efficacy of the algorithm, predictions are made for test cases contained within the training range but for which the CFD data were not used when training. Results demonstrate that the proposed technique properly characterizes temperature peaks and distributions within the domain for a broad range of scenarios.