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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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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Latest News
IAEA again raises global nuclear power projections
Noting recent momentum behind nuclear power, the International Atomic Energy Agency has revised up its projections for the expansion of nuclear power, estimating that global nuclear operational capacity will more than double by 2050—reaching 2.6 times the 2024 level—with small modular reactors expected to play a pivotal role in this high-case scenario.
IAEA director general Rafael Mariano Grossi announced the new projections, contained in the annual report Energy, Electricity, and Nuclear Power Estimates for the Period up to 2050 at the 69th IAEA General Conference in Vienna.
In the report’s high-case scenario, nuclear electrical generating capacity is projected to increase to from 377 GW at the end of 2024 to 992 GW by 2050. In a low-case scenario, capacity rises 50 percent, compared with 2024, to 561 GW. SMRs are projected to account for 24 percent of the new capacity added in the high case and for 5 percent in the low case.
Taiyang Zhang, Caleb S. Brooks
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 10 | October 2023 | Pages 1414-1441
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2151823
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Natural circulation is employed in new designs of light water reactors to enhance passive safety by maintaining flow and heat removal without pumps. Under low-pressure and low-flow-rate conditions, natural circulation is susceptible to two-phase instabilities leading to undesirable flow oscillations and operational difficulties. Flashing instability is one of the most widely reported low-pressure natural circulation instabilities, related to saturated vaporization triggered by a hydrostatic pressure drop in an adiabatic riser above a heated section. While existing studies have reported flashing instability experiments, modeling, and simulations including successes in matching numerical results and experimental data, solid yet clear analytical explanations for many of its qualitative features are still rare. To enhance the physical understanding beyond stability boundary prediction, the current work develops, validates, and analyzes a linear stability model of flashing instability. This model adopts a one-dimensional Drift-Flux Model simplified by physical assumptions and approximations, and it includes optional component models to match an actual facility for validation. Stability tests are performed on a 5-m-tall natural circulation loop, providing comprehensive benchmark data covering stability boundaries, one-dimensional transient signals, and periodic mean waveforms from local measurements. Validation confirms acceptable predictions of steady states, stability boundaries, and oscillation periods. The tractable model formulation leads to a closed-form characteristic function facilitating analytical manipulations and physical interpretations, based on which dominant pressure drop responses to inlet flow rate are extracted. The major instability mechanism is identified as a strong response of the two-phase driving force to the inlet flow rate that is delayed by enthalpy transportation through a long single-phase distance and can become an overwhelmingly destabilizing positive feedback under low-frequency perturbations. Experimentally reported qualitative features, including stability changes, timescale relations, and oscillation patterns, are analytically predicted and physically explained with clarity. In general, this study enriches experimental resources of flashing instability with a comprehensive dataset and provides a simple yet realistic analytical basis for physically understanding flashing instability beyond predicting stability boundaries.