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Materials Science & Technology
The objectives of MSTD are: promote the advancement of materials science in Nuclear Science Technology; support the multidisciplines which constitute it; encourage research by providing a forum for the presentation, exchange, and documentation of relevant information; promote the interaction and communication among its members; and recognize and reward its members for significant contributions to the field of materials science in nuclear technology.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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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Glass strategy: Hanford’s enhanced waste glass program
The mission of the Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection (ORP) is to complete the safe cleanup of waste resulting from decades of nuclear weapons development. One of the most technologically challenging responsibilities is the safe disposition of approximately 56 million gallons of radioactive waste historically stored in 177 tanks at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
ORP has a clear incentive to reduce the overall mission duration and cost. One pathway is to develop and deploy innovative technical solutions that can advance baseline flow sheets toward higher efficiency operations while reducing identified risks without compromising safety. Vitrification is the baseline process that will convert both high-level and low-level radioactive waste at Hanford into a stable glass waste form for long-term storage and disposal.
Although vitrification is a mature technology, there are key areas where technology can further reduce operational risks, advance baseline processes to maximize waste throughput, and provide the underpinning to enhance operational flexibility; all steps in reducing mission duration and cost.
Shangzhen Xie, Jiyun Zhao (City Univ of Hong Kong)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 172-181
External reactor vessel cooling (ERVC) is proved as a necessary system in in-vessel retention management in the nuclear power plant to transfer the heat from failed core to outside vessel, in the aim of preserving intact vessel and avoiding severe accidents. To provide advanced safety guarantee for the next generation of nuclear power plant, a greater designed safety margin should be considered and proposed, such as increasing the tolerance of high heat flux by using advanced materials of the vessel, insulated structures between reactor core and the vessel, and superior coolant in ERVC system. As long as the heat flux of the reactor vessel wall emerged from melt-core does not go beyond the maximum limitation?Critical Heat Flux (CHF), the decay heat can be dissipated timely and thus the reactor can be cooled down without releasing radiation products. In this case, increasing critical heat flux by various approaches is deemed essential also attract intensive studies in nuclear systems. In fact, the research of the enhancement of critical heat flux has a long history, with extensive experiments and simulations devoted in the last several decades to seeking for methods to expand thermal margin and it continues to be a promising topic in heat transfer research fields. In this paper, we present a comprehensive overview of CHF enhancement experiments, focusing on four broad categories of approaches. The first approach considered is amelioration of fluid properties by adding nanoparticles into the base fluid, by which both flow boiling and pool boiling achieve significant improvements in CHF. The second prevailing method recently is surface modifications by various advanced techniques. Third, we review the effect of various modified channel structures on the boiling process. Finally, some creative and notable hybrid techniques are presented. Based on this review of the state-of-the-art in CHF enhancement, future research directions are also proposed.