ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Division Spotlight
Robotics & Remote Systems
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.
Meeting Spotlight
Utility Working Conference and Vendor Technology Expo (UWC 2024)
August 4–7, 2024
Marco Island, FL|JW Marriott Marco Island
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Jul 2024
Jan 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
August 2024
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
ARPA-E announces $40 million to develop transmutation technologies for UNF
The Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) announced $40 million in funding to develop cutting-edge technologies to enable the transmutation of used nuclear fuel into less-radioactive substances. According to ARPA-E, the new initiative addresses one of the agency’s core goals as outlined by Congress: to provide transformative solutions to improve the management, cleanup, and disposal of radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel.
Andrey Ovcharov, Richard Szczepanski, Jacek Kosek, Nuno Pedrosa, Xiaofei Lu, Lorenzo Basili, Rosa Lo Frano, Donato Aquaro
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 3 | April 2020 | Pages 179-190
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1689891
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Operation of the fuel cycle of a thermonuclear fusion reactor naturally leads to accumulation of surplus protium, but in some cases it can also lead to accumulation of surplus deuterium. Both surplus protium and deuterium have to be separated, detritiated, and discharged to the environment, normally passing a final detritiation stage based on either the liquid phase catalytic exchange or water distillation process. The concept of a multicolumn cryogenic distillation (CD) system capable of discharging a time-varying surplus of deuterium is presented in this paper. A model of a CD column based on a UV (internal energy U – volume V) flash formulation and equation of state (EOS) thermodynamic model for hydrogen isotopologue mixtures is also presented at the principal step to a comprehensive model of the isotope separation system. Although fundamental for constant volume systems, the UV formulation of the thermodynamic state has not been widely used in transient simulations; in particular, for distillation dynamics modeling, other approaches are much more common. At the same time, in helium cryogenics the UV formulation has gained wide usage in large-scale dynamic simulations. It is known from the literature that a UV formulation of the distillation problem is very challenging for a numerically stable implementation. To cope with this situation, we present our findings on the sources of numerical instabilities and approaches.