ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Division Spotlight
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Winter Conference and Expo
November 17–21, 2024
Orlando, FL|Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld
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!
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Keeping up with Kewaunee
In October 2012, Dominion Energy announced it was closing the Kewaunee nuclear power plant, a two-loop 574-MWe pressurized water reactor located about 27 miles southeast of Green Bay, Wis., on the western shore of Lake Michigan. At the time, Dominion said the plant was running well, but that low wholesale electricity prices in the region made it uneconomical to continue operation of the single-unit merchant power plant.
John C. Petrykowski
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 10 | October 2023 | Pages 1495-1507
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2023.2222249
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In nuclear reactor accident safety studies, the radiological source term is a metric that quantifies the release of radiological material from the reactor to the environment. The present work evaluates heat transfer between high-temperature vapor bubbles and the surrounding coolant and the effect these interactions have on the source term for postulated core disruptive accident scenarios associated with an oxide-fueled, liquid metal–cooled fast reactor class. It is shown that aerosol particle size can influence heat transfer, and it is suggested that the extent of the influence depends on the fineness of the particles in the aerosol. The results are consistent with legacy experiments conducted in the Fuel Aerosol Simulant Test (FAST) facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and offer a more comprehensive assessment of vapor condensation by treating the bubble constituents, in the context of radiation heat transfer, as participating media. The model, which couples classical scattering theory to the equation of radiative transfer and the energy equation, provides a means for estimating size-affected radiative cooling times. Solutions are obtained via the P-1 method of spherical harmonics with improved, higher-order boundary conditions. Outcomes include the development of an “extinction-time ratio” criterion for assessing whether ejection of aerosol from the bubble to the cover region is likely. Aerosol release from the coolant pool is evaluated using this criterion with the potential to extend this work to reactor-scale accidents. A baseline evaluation is provided that shows that omission of participatory effects could lead, in a relative sense, to cooling time offsets in excess of 14%. In addition to enhancing previous evaluations of FAST results, these modeling outcomes contribute to knowledge management efforts aimed at developing a more mechanistic assessment of the source term while suggesting potential enhancements to severe accident safety analysis through the use of more comprehensive radiative heat transfer models.
