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NN Asks: What hurdles stand in the way of nuclear power’s global expansion?
Jake Jurewicz
Nuclear technology is mature. It provides firm power at scale with minimal externalities and has done so for decades. The core problem isn’t about the technology—it is how the plants are built. Nuclear construction has a well-documented history of cost and schedule overruns. Previous nuclear plants often spent more than twice what was first budgeted, making nuclear among the power technologies with the largest average cost overruns worldwide.
Recent projects illustrate how severe the problem can be. In South Carolina, the V.C. Summer nuclear expansion saw projected costs rise from roughly $10 billion to more than $25 billion before the project was abandoned in 2017, by which time more than $9 billion had already been spent and customers were stuck paying for a site they have yet to benefit from.
Ketan Ajay, Ravi Kumar, Akhilesh Gupta
Nuclear Technology | Volume 210 | Number 3 | March 2024 | Pages 457-470
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2023.2229190
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A reactor core overheats due to decay heat generated in the fuel when an effective cooling medium is unavailable, such as in a loss-of-coolant accident combined with a loss of emergency core coolant. If the heat generated is not effectively dissipated, then at extreme temperatures, the structural strength of the bundle assembly may deteriorate, leading to slumping of fuel elements onto the inner wall of the pressure tube. It is essential to examine the temperature behavior of the channel containing fuel pins in a disassembled state in order to comprehend the impact of further thermally induced deformations in the channel during postulated accident conditions. Capturing the temperature of channel components at each circumferential position from experiments is extremely difficult; thus, a modeling tool is necessary to obtain a thorough circumferential temperature profile. This paper presents a numerical study that aims to study the temperature distributions in a 1-m-long pressurized heavy water reactor (PHWR) channel containing a disassembled fuel bundle. The channel geometry and the boundary conditions implemented were obtained from the experiment. A temperature profile for each channel element at every circumferential and axial location was obtained. A thorough comparison of the predicted and the reported experimental values was performed, and it was found that the predicted temperature behavior of the channel was consistent with the experimental data. Further simulations with different fuel element configurations and decay powers may be carried out; in addition, the results obtained may be used for coupled thermal-mechanical and thermal-mechanical-chemical simulations.