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Division Spotlight
Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
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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Latest News
College students help develop waste-measuring device at Hanford
A partnership between Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) and Washington State University has resulted in the development of a device to measure radioactive and chemical tank waste at the Hanford Site. WRPS is the contractor at Hanford for the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management.
Joseph R. Burns, David Chandler (ORNL), Bojan Petrovic (Georgia Tech), Kurt A. Terrani (ORNL)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 738-745
The application of advanced manufacturing to the fabrication of control elements (CEs) for the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) is under investigation at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Advanced manufacturing yields a unique CE design with lumped neutron absorbers, necessitating investigation of the neutronic implications of employing this novel CE design in HFIR. This work assesses the operational performance of advanced manufactured CEs in HFIR throughout their useful lifetime. CE depletion calculations are carried out for long residence time (50 cycles) under several predictor-corrector approximation schemes of varying rigor, with their reactivity worth evaluated at beginning, middle, and end of life. While coarse temporal divisions of the long CE irradiation time yield prominent discrepancies in the isotopic content predicted by each approximation, the corresponding reactivity worth predictions are reasonably consistent across approximations. Further, regardless of the approximation employed, the reactivity worth of the advanced manufactured CEs is found to be comparable to that of the original CEs throughout their useful lifetime. The core power distribution is also not prohibitively perturbed by the introduction of the new CE design at any time in the CE life. Pending irradiation characterization testing, it may thus be concluded that the advanced manufactured CE design can successfully replace the current design and is neutronically feasible for the operation of HFIR.