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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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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Latest News
IAEA again raises global nuclear power projections
Noting recent momentum behind nuclear power, the International Atomic Energy Agency has revised up its projections for the expansion of nuclear power, estimating that global nuclear operational capacity will more than double by 2050—reaching 2.6 times the 2024 level—with small modular reactors expected to play a pivotal role in this high-case scenario.
IAEA director general Rafael Mariano Grossi announced the new projections, contained in the annual report Energy, Electricity, and Nuclear Power Estimates for the Period up to 2050 at the 69th IAEA General Conference in Vienna.
In the report’s high-case scenario, nuclear electrical generating capacity is projected to increase to from 377 GW at the end of 2024 to 992 GW by 2050. In a low-case scenario, capacity rises 50 percent, compared with 2024, to 561 GW. SMRs are projected to account for 24 percent of the new capacity added in the high case and for 5 percent in the low case.
S. Siriano, A. Tassone, G. Caruso
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 77 | Number 2 | February 2021 | Pages 144-158
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1858671
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Liquid metals offer unique properties and their use in a nuclear fusion reactor, both as confined flows and free-surface flow, is widely studied in the fusion community. The interaction between this conductive fluid and the tokamak magnetic fields leads to magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) phenomena that influence the flow features. To properly design components that employ liquid metals, it is necessary to accurately predict these features, and although the efforts have been made in development, a mature code specifically customized to simulate MHD flows is still unavailable. In this work, the general purpose computational fluid dynamics code ANSYS CFX 18.2 is validated for MHD free-surface thin-film flow with insulated walls up to and for several values of the characteristic width/thickness ratio, comparing the results with the theoretical relation available in the literature. For all the cases considered, the maximum integral error is found to be below 10%. Successively, the validated code is used to investigate the MHD flow in a chute with a characteristic film ratio equal to 0.1 and for . Uniform and nonuniform wall electrical conductivity cases are considered with the latter modeled by placing on the side walls and on the back wall localized regions with different conductivity. The electrical conductivity of the back wall is found to have a negligible effect on the global flow when the lateral wall is insulated, similarly to what is observed for the analogous bounded flow. Contrariwise, an electrically conductive lateral wall is found to enhance the free-surface jet and to modify the Hartmann layer structure.