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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.
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International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver 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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Fusion Science and Technology
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Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
Guangming Zhou, Bradut-Eugen Ghidersa, Francisco A. Hernández, Qinlan Kang, Heiko Neuberger
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 8 | November 2019 | Pages 1016-1023
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1629247
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Within the framework of EUROfusion activities, the helium cooled pebble bed (HCPB) breeding blanket is under development in Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). The enhanced HCPB, using a fissionlike fuel breeder pin assembly configuration, is proposed as the near-term breeding blanket for the European Union DEMOnstration power plant (EU DEMO). The helium gas with a pressure of 8 MPa is used as the coolant, EUROFER is used as the structural material, advanced ceramic breeder pebbles are used as the tritium breeder, and Be12Ti is used as the neutron multiplier material. In contrast to the former HCPB cooling plate configuration, the fuel breeder pin assemblies greatly reduce the pressure drop, reducing the circulating power to the level where state-of-the-art helium turbomachinery can be used. However, because of the reduced coolant velocity in the breeder zone, the heat transfer performance is compromised, especially in the annular channel of the fuel breeder pins. An increased surface roughness is therefore proposed as a heat transfer augmentation technique for the fuel breeder pins. Although heat transfer augmentation using artificial roughness is common, it is relatively novel for small annular gaps with moderate velocity as the ones in the fuel breeder pins. Currently, a dedicated correlation for the small annular rough-wall channel is available to predict the Nu number. This correlation is wished here to be benchmarked and validated experimentally. Therefore, an experimental investigation on a fuel breeder pin mock-up (mock-up 1) is planned. Additionally, based on computational fluid dynamics calculation, unsteady, nonuniform flow patterns were found at the return flow after the jet impingement in the first-wall region. Another upscaled mock-up (mock-up 2) to investigate the nonuniform flow patterns of the return flow in the annular channel of the fuel breeder pin is planned. The dedicated experimental campaigns are foreseen at the Helium Loop Karlsruhe (HELOKA) in KIT as validation and proof-of-concept test rigs for this enhanced pin design. In this paper, the motivation and the preliminary design of these two mock-ups of the enhanced EU DEMO HCPB blanket are shown, together with the plan for the foreseen experiments.