ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Division Spotlight
Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
Meeting Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Jun 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
August 2025
Nuclear Technology
July 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Report: New York state adding 1 GW of nuclear to fleet
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has instructed the state’s public electric utility to add at least 1 gigawatt of new nuclear by building a large-scale nuclear plant or a collection of smaller modular reactors, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Wael Hilali, Nihed Lasmar, Michael Buck, Joerg Starflinger, Eckart Laurien (Univ of Stuttgartf)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 229-238
One of the crucial questions in the management and mitigation of the consequences of a severe accident in light water reactors (LWR) is how to cool and stabilize the molten corium. For several designs of LWR, a deep pool of water is foreseen in the lower drywell of the containment. In the case of the failure of the reactor pressure vessel, the core melt materials will be discharged into the pool. By contact with water, it will fragment, solidify and settle on the bottom forming a porous debris bed. A two-dimensional continuum model of the deposition and relocation of particles is described in this paper. The mathematical model is based on a hyperbolic system of partial differential equations determining the distribution of the flowing layer depth and the depth-averaged velocity component tangential to the sliding bed. Because of the hyperbolicity of the system, successful implementation of a solver is challenging, notably when large gradients of the physical variables appear, e.g., for a moving front in the flowing layer or possibly formed shock waves during the deposition. In this paper, several numerical methods are applied to solve the system and compared, including the first-order upstream difference scheme, as well as the Roe’s Riemann solver, and high-resolution NOC (Non-Oscillatory Central Differencing) schemes, in which several TVD (Total Variation Diminishing) limiters and reconstruction methods are applied. The implemented solver has provided promising results, which are verified with analytical solutions in the steady state. The spatial convergence is also reported and quantified with the use of the grid convergence index (GCI). The performed simulations with this modeling approach give some useful insights for the study of the most critical parameters influencing granular bed formation process. It will contribute to the enhancement of the capabilities of the system code COCOMO simulating real reactor applications and providing more realistic data.