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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.
Abdelfatah Abdelmaksoud, Hesham Elbakhshawangy, Mohamed Abdelaziz
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 6 | June 2023 | Pages 857-871
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2158667
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the present work, a numerical study of inward and outward buckling of two successive fuel plates of a typical material testing reactor is investigated using computational fluid dynamics code. Fuel plate buckling results in partial blockage of the hot channel. Both buckling toward the inside and outside are considered. Simulations are conducted for different blockage levels of the nominal flow area, i.e., 0%, 20%, 40%, 50%, 60%, and 70% for inward buckling. Blockage levels of 0%, 20%, 40%, 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%, and 90% are considered for outward buckling. The impact of the flow field redistribution in four successive channels on the cooling capacity of each channel is investigated. The obtained results show that for an inward buckling ratio greater than 50%, critical phenomena will occur that could affect the clad integrity. Moreover, for inward buckling of 70%, the maximum clad temperature in the blocked channel reaches the value associated with the onset of nucleate boiling at the operating pressure. On the other hand, for outward buckling of 90%, critical phenomena that could affect the clad integrity will occur.
