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Division Spotlight
Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
Meeting Spotlight
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
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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
May 2025
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.
Anisia Mihaela Bornea, Marius Zamfirache, George Ana, Liviu Stefan, Ovidiu Balteanu, Ciprian Bucur
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 4 | May 2020 | Pages 384-391
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1712991
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In order to ensure the efficient management of radioactive waste in the form of tritiated light water and tritiated heavy water with low tritium and/or deuterium concentration, Institute for Cryogenics and Isotopic Technologies (ICSI) Rm.Valcea is developing an experimental demonstration facility based on the combined electrolysis catalytic exchange (CECE) separation process. The facility is completing the experimental pilot plant for tritium and deuterium separation—the installation support for heavy water detritiation from the CANDU reactors in Romania.
The concentration of deuterium from low-concentrated waste extends the recovery area from below 1% D2O/(D2O + H2O), corresponding to the minimum threshold of the Cernavoda Upgrading Facility, thus contributing to the reduction of heavy water losses. At the same time the tritium recovery process will be increased.
The experimental installation has an innovative solution that reconfigures a proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolyzer for tritium qualification thereby improving equipment specific to hydrogen isotope separation processes.
This paper presents the experimental installation conceptual scheme, including the measurement and control elements. A modeling software for simulation of the nonsteady-state regime of the CECE separation process, specific to the deuterium/tritium isotopes concentration process in the liquid phase, is also presented. The mathematical model integrates the characteristic equations of separation by liquid phase catalytic exchange (LPCE), the mathematical representation of isotope separation by electrolysis, and the water distillation from the oxygen purification process in a nonstationary regime.
An analysis is presented for the concentration of various low-concentrated tritium waste. We also investigate the influence of the electrolyzer liquid holdup and the isotopic separation column holdup on concentrated water production.
