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The Mission of the Robotics and Remote Systems Division is to promote the development and application of immersive simulation, robotics, and remote systems for hazardous environments for the purpose of reducing hazardous exposure to individuals, reducing environmental hazards and reducing the cost of performing work.
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2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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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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ANS announces 2025 Presidential Citations
One of the privileges of being president of the American Nuclear Society is awarding Presidential Citations to individuals who have demonstrated outstanding effort in some manner for the benefit of ANS or the nuclear community at large. Citations are conferred twice each year, at the Annual and Winter Meetings.
ANS President Lisa Marshall has named this season’s recipients, who will receive recognition at the upcoming Annual Conference in Chicago during the Special Session on Tuesday, June 17.
Shinji Matsushita, Masafumi Nojima (Hitachi), Takeshi Sakai, Tadashi Fujii (Hitachi-Ge Nuclear)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 1098-1104
Corium cooling system plays an important role to prevent the interaction between the molten corium and concrete of a pedestal region. As the material for constituting the corium cooling system, zirconia-based refractory materials are promising due to its high melting points and chemical stabilities. To estimate the erosion depth of the refractory material in the severe accidents, we developed an interaction model for molten corium and zirconia refractory material based on the erosion mechanism. Our developed model were based on two main phenomena; reduction reaction of the zirconia refractory material and oxygen diffusion in the zirconia. On the interface of the molten corium, oxygen in the zirconia are extracted by the reduction reaction. On the other hand, in the zirconia, oxygen are transferred to the interface according to Fick's laws of diffusion because the reduction reactions induce concentration gradient of oxygen in the zirconia. Thus, the erosion rate of the zirconia are governed by the reduction reaction and oxygen diffusion. We modeled the erosion behaviors as three phase: (1) just reduction reaction phase, (2) transitional erosion phase, (3) steady erosion phase. As a result, we found that our model grasp the trend of the erosion behaviors. As the future works, we require to investigate the temperature dependency of the reduction reaction rate to evaluate more accurately.