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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
Meeting Spotlight
ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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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Colin Judge: Testing structural materials in Idaho’s newest hot cell facility
Idaho National Laboratory’s newest facility—the Sample Preparation Laboratory (SPL)—sits across the road from the Hot Fuel Examination Facility (HFEF), which started operating in 1975. SPL will host the first new hot cells at INL’s Materials and Fuels Complex (MFC) in 50 years, giving INL researchers and partners new flexibility to test the structural properties of irradiated materials fresh from the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) or from a partner’s facility.
Materials meant to withstand extreme conditions in fission or fusion power plants must be tested under similar conditions and pushed past their breaking points so performance and limitations can be understood and improved. Once irradiated, materials samples can be cut down to size in SPL and packaged for testing in other facilities at INL or other national laboratories, commercial labs, or universities. But they can also be subjected to extreme thermal or corrosive conditions and mechanical testing right in SPL, explains Colin Judge, who, as INL’s division director for nuclear materials performance, oversees SPL and other facilities at the MFC.
SPL won’t go “hot” until January 2026, but Judge spoke with NN staff writer Susan Gallier about its capabilities as his team was moving instruments into the new facility.
Friday, May 20, 2022|8:00AM–5:30PM EDT
Ellwood
Although mainly distributed as a CFD toolbox, OpenFOAM is structured as a general open-source library for the discretization and parallel solution of partial differential equations on unstructured meshes. This combines with a high-level object-oriented API and with an intuitive finite-volume discretization method to allow for a streamlined development of advanced multi-physics solvers for various applications and by authors with various backgrounds. This is resulting in a rapidly growing community of users and developers, with a number of official and community-driven solvers that can nowadays help complement legacy nuclear codes with a wide geometric flexibility, HPC scalability, quick code tailoring, streamlined coupling possibilities, and a full transparency for improved E&T approaches.
The workshop will first present an overview of the multi-physics capabilities of OpenFOAM; listing its main features as a numerical library; highlighting some important achievements and milestones from various authors; singling out currently available solvers for nuclear applications; and discussing the lessons learned from a decade of development efforts. The objective will be to provide the audience with up-to-date information about the modelling possibilities provided by OpenFOAM and to summarize its strengths and challenges, thus allowing for more informed decisions about the opportunity to employ OpenFOAM, or existing OpenFOAM-based tools, for one's own applications.
The workshop will then provide a practical introduction to two open-source tools based on OpenFOAM, namely: the GeN-Foam code for the multiphysics analysis of nuclear reactors; and the OFFBEAT code for the 1.5-D, 2-D and 3-D simulation of fuel behaviour. Topics covered will include learning best practices, available resources, setting up a model, running, post-processing, basics of code tailoring. The objective will be to provide all necessary information for autonomous learning and use of these tools.
The workshop will be conducted as a mix of presentations, open discussions and practical examples. Participants are encouraged to test the practical examples on their own laptops. To that purpose, participants will need to have OpenFOAM 9 already installed (including paraFoam or paraview). Installation instructions are available at https://openfoam.org/download/
