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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Bipartisan Fusion Energy Act pushes for regulatory clarity
Sen. Alex Padilla (D., Calif.) introduced the Fusion Energy Act (S. 4151) last month with a bipartisan group of cosponsors—John Cornyn (R., Texas), Cory Booker (D., N.J.), Todd Young (R., Ind.), and Patty Murray (D., Wash.). The legislation would codify the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s regulatory authority over commercial fusion energy systems to streamline the creation of clear federal regulations that will support the development of commercial fusion power plants—and would require a report within one year on a study of risk- and performance-based, design-specific licensing frameworks for “mass-manufactured fusion machines.
“Congress must do everything in its power to ensure continued U.S. leadership in developing commercial fusion energy facilities,” said Padilla as he introduced the bill. “The Fusion Energy Act would provide regulatory certainty for investors as the NRC develops and streamlines frameworks for such facilities.”
B. Boer, D. Lathouwers, J. L. Kloosterman, T. H. J. J. Van Der Hagen, G. Strydom
Nuclear Technology | Volume 170 | Number 2 | May 2010 | Pages 306-321
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-A9485
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The DALTON-THERMIX code system has been developed for safety analysis and core optimization of pebble-bed reactors. The code system consists of the new three-dimensional diffusion code DALTON, which is coupled to the existing thermal-hydraulic code THERMIX. These codes are linked to a database procedure for the generation of neutron cross sections using SCALE-5.The behavior of pebble-bed reactors during a loss of forced cooling (LOFC) transient is of particular interest since the absence of forced cooling could lead to a significant increase of the temperature of the coated particle fuel. Therefore, the reactor power may be constrained during normal operation to limit the temperature.For validation purposes, calculation results of normal operation, an LOFC transient, and a control rod withdrawal transient without SCRAM have been compared with experimental data obtained in the High Temperature Reactor-10 (HTR-10). The code system has been applied to the 400-MW(thermal) pebble bed modular reactor (PBMR) design, including the analysis of three different LOFC transients. Theses results are verified by a comparison with the results of the existing TINTE code system.It was found that the code system is capable of modeling both small (HTR-10) and large (PBMR) pebble-bed reactors and therefore provides a flexible tool for safety analysis and core optimization of future reactor designs. The analyses of the LOFC transients show that the peak fuel temperature is only slightly elevated (less than +100° C) as compared to its nominal value in the HTR-10 but reaches a maximum value of 1648° C during the depressurized LOFC case of the PBMR benchmark, which is significantly higher than the peak fuel temperature (976° C) during normal operation.