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2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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Nuclear’s moment: The ANS Annual Conference opens in the Mile-High City
The nuclear community descended on Denver, Colo., this week for the American Nuclear Society’s Annual Conference, which opened with a packed room and inspiring words from multiple speakers.
Mohammed Muaaz Mohamed Dilshad Hussain, Fajar Sri Lestari Pangukir, Dirk Cornelis Visser, Marek Michal Stempniewicz, Ferry Roelofs, Julio Pacio, Katrien Van Tichelen
Nuclear Technology | Volume 212 | Number 6 | June 2026 | Pages 1414-1433
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2025.2588975
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Liquid metal–cooled reactors are a Generation IV reactor type that has the advantage of high power density owing to the high thermal conductivity of metals. The thermohydraulic phenomena that occur in the reactor pool, such as flow patterns, thermal diffusion, and stratification in different scenarios (steady operation, accidents, noncritical transients, etc.) have been and still are a topic of great interest in various research projects. One such reactor is MYRRHA, a flexible fast-spectrum research reactor cooled by lead-bismuth eutectic (LBE) in a pool configuration under design in Belgium. In support of its development, the European SCAled Pool Experiment (E-SCAPE), a one-sixth-scale model of the same, was developed within the collaborative European framework of the THINS (Thermal-Hydraulics of Innovative Nuclear Systems) and MYRTE (MYRRHA Research and Transmutation Endeavour) projects. This LBE mock-up, constructed and operational at SCK CEN in Belgium, serves to provide relevant data that give insight into the thermohydraulic phenomena and provides the possibility to carry out numerical code validation and support the overall design of MYRRHA. In the framework of the collaborative European project PASCAL (Proof of Augmented Safety Conditions in Advanced Liquid-metal-cooled systems), NRG PALLAS aims to perform multiscale simulations of asymmetric accident scenarios (i.e. single-loop heat exchanger failure and single pump failure) of E-SCAPE by coupling the in-house system thermal hydraulic code SPECTRA to the commercial computational fluid dynamics code STAR-CCM+ via the in-house coupling tool myMUSCLE: MultiphYsics MUltiscale Simulation CoupLing Environment. In a previous article, the construction of the standalone models of SPECTRA and STAR-CCM+ was reported. The simulation results were compared to a steady-state isothermal E-SCAPE experiment at a mass flow rate of 93.2 kg/s and a temperature of 180°C, showing good agreement of both models with each other and the experiment. In this paper, the next step is taken by performing coupled calculations of the same isothermal case and comparing them to the standalone and experimental results. The calculations reveal stable solutions that are well in agreement with the standalone results.