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Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
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2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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High-temperature plumbing and advanced reactors
The use of nuclear fission power and its role in impacting climate change is hotly debated. Fission advocates argue that short-term solutions would involve the rapid deployment of Gen III+ nuclear reactors, like Vogtle-3 and -4, while long-term climate change impact would rely on the creation and implementation of Gen IV reactors, “inherently safe” reactors that use passive laws of physics and chemistry rather than active controls such as valves and pumps to operate safely. While Gen IV reactors vary in many ways, one thing unites nearly all of them: the use of exotic, high-temperature coolants. These fluids, like molten salts and liquid metals, can enable reactor engineers to design much safer nuclear reactors—ultimately because the boiling point of each fluid is extremely high. Fluids that remain liquid over large temperature ranges can provide good heat transfer through many demanding conditions, all with minimal pressurization. Although the most apparent use for these fluids is advanced fission power, they have the potential to be applied to other power generation sources such as fusion, thermal storage, solar, or high-temperature process heat.1–3
Saroj Kumar Panda, Panantharayil Vishnu Anand, Vivek Kumar Mishra, Ramachandran Pillai Rajeev, Konda Athmaram Venkatesan, Krishnamurthy Ananthasivan
Nuclear Technology | Volume 211 | Number 3 | March 2025 | Pages 377-399
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2024.2326714
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
There are widespread occurrence and application of solid-liquid sedimentation processes among different industries. Therefore, it becomes important to understand the hydrodynamic inside the process equipment and particle agglomeration characteristics. In the present work, solid-liquid sedimentation is analyzed, which will be helpful for the design of continuous process equipment in plutonium (Pu) reconversion. Experiments were carried out in a batch settler to understand solid sedimentation in suspension in terms of varying the overall solid fractions. Euler-Euler two-fluid simulations were performed to investigate the local and overall solid phase volume fraction distributions, position of the active interface (AI) (settling curve), axial solid phase velocity, and pressure distributions during settling, and selected data were compared with the measured data. Further, the discrete population balance model (PBM) with different agglomeration kernels was used with the two-fluid computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model to understand and further improve predictions in terms of the AI position. The variation in number density of the different particles in the settler with time was investigated. The predicted results show that agglomeration is dominant during the sedimentation process and application of the discrete PBM with the CFD model enhances the predictive capability in comparison with the predictions obtained from only the two-fluid model. The results reported using CFD+PBM will aid in the design of continuous process equipment (thickener/precipitator) for Pu reconversion.