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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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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Russia withdraws from 25-year-old weapons-grade plutonium agreement
Russia’s lower house of Parliament, the State Duma, approved a measure to withdraw from a 25-year-old agreement with the United States to cut back on the leftover plutonium from Cold War–era nuclear weapons.
Yann Le Moigne (Westinghouse Electric Sweden AB), Paul Smeekes (Teollisuuden Voima Oyj), Matthew Solmos (Westinghouse)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 1115-1124
In a BWR, the cooler feedwater is injected in the downcomer of the reactor vessel where it mixes with the recirculation water that is separated from the generated steam at the exit of the core. In order to avoid high temperature fluctuations on the reactor vessel and the structures present in the downcomer, this mixing shall be performed in a controlled manner. In order to improve the design of the feedwater spargers in Olkiluoto Unit 1 and 2 in Finland, the thermal mixing of the feedwater with the reactor water in the vicinity of the spargers has been studied with transient Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) calculations. The studies have been performed at three different power levels. Unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (URANS) calculations have been performed to simulate about 40 s of the water mixing. The time history of the variations of the water temperature on the structures in the downcomer has been analyzed. The calculations have been run for several designs of the replacement spargers. The designs have been assessed using transient statistics of the temperature fluctuations. Minimizing the maximum amplitude of the temperature variations, the so-called peak-to-peak value, has been a design objective.