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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
2024 ANS Winter Conference and Expo
November 17–21, 2024
Orlando, FL|Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld
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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August 2024
Latest News
Nuclear new build procurement considerations
It may seem counterintuitive, but the best time to enhance the ability to support operations and maintenance for a new plant is before construction starts. This is one of many lessons learned by the currently operating nuclear fleet. As construction and startup of many nuclear facilities was completed, it quickly became evident that the ability to efficiently support operations and maintenance was limited. Most of the information necessary to establish and manage procurement of spare and replacement items, maintenance, and configuration of the facilities was unavailable and had to be gathered on a case-by-case, “on-demand” basis. Absence of necessary information and the associated challenges resulted in the need for staff augmentation and multiyear-long projects to develop equipment bills of material and maintenance programs and to perform technical evaluations for the huge quantities of spare and replacement items being requested.
E. Clark, A. Lumsdaine, K. Ekici, A. Ruggles
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 72 | Number 3 | October 2017 | Pages 278-284
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1333823
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
High heat flux thermal management is an important challenge for upcoming nuclear fusion and plasma physics experiments. The plasma facing components (PFCs) in devices such as ITER or Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) will be subjected to extreme heat loads on the order of 10–20 MW/m2 in the divertor region. The heat dissipation issue will become critical in this next generation of experiments, and active cooling will be necessary. The current state-of-the-art water cooled technologies can accommodate extreme heat fluxes and often utilize passive heat transfer enhancement techniques, such as swirl flow, to decrease the thermal loading on PFCs. Swirling flow is commonly induced with a twisted tape that is inserted into a circular tube. Twisted tape devices are planned for use in both W7-X and ITER. Computational modeling was performed to investigate the thermal-hydraulic performance for single-phase, turbulent flow of water through a twisted tape device. This study exploited the advantage of computational simulations by analyzing local flow information. It was shown that points of low wall shear stress corresponded to locations of low heat transfer coefficient and high surface temperatures. Thus, decreased wall shear stress could be an indicator for early burnout in twisted tape geometries. This analysis was the first step towards informing the design of twisted tape devices utilized in PFCs.