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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.
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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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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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Colin Judge: Testing structural materials in Idaho’s newest hot cell facility
Idaho National Laboratory’s newest facility—the Sample Preparation Laboratory (SPL)—sits across the road from the Hot Fuel Examination Facility (HFEF), which started operating in 1975. SPL will host the first new hot cells at INL’s Materials and Fuels Complex (MFC) in 50 years, giving INL researchers and partners new flexibility to test the structural properties of irradiated materials fresh from the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) or from a partner’s facility.
Materials meant to withstand extreme conditions in fission or fusion power plants must be tested under similar conditions and pushed past their breaking points so performance and limitations can be understood and improved. Once irradiated, materials samples can be cut down to size in SPL and packaged for testing in other facilities at INL or other national laboratories, commercial labs, or universities. But they can also be subjected to extreme thermal or corrosive conditions and mechanical testing right in SPL, explains Colin Judge, who, as INL’s division director for nuclear materials performance, oversees SPL and other facilities at the MFC.
SPL won’t go “hot” until January 2026, but Judge spoke with NN staff writer Susan Gallier about its capabilities as his team was moving instruments into the new facility.
Lingrui Li, Zijia Zhao, Yanyun Ma, Zhe Ma, Jiang Lai, Yunliang Zhu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 78 | Number 6 | August 2022 | Pages 475-489
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2022.2049121
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
With the development of magnetic confinement fusion (MCF), it has become feasible for fusion energy to solve the future energy crisis. High-energy neutrons are produced during the fusion reaction. Neutron shielding and the tritium breeding ratio in MCF require a neutron source of high precision. In traditional methods, the neutron source is supposed to be isotropic. However, the double-differential cross sections for nuclear fusion given in the ENDF/B-VI database make it possible to calculate the neutron direction distribution in deuterium-tritium (D-T) plasma. In this study, a Maxwellian reactivity rate database is obtained by extracting double-differential cross-section data from the ENDF/B-VI database and then revising it. Monte Carlo and discrete ordinate methods are used to simulate transportation and fusion in D-T plasma and obtain the angular distribution of the neutron generation rate. The results of a preliminary numerical simulation in a simple model tell us that the difference between anisotropy and isotropy can reach an average of 4.6%. A temperature-corrected double-differential cross-section database and a numerical simulation method are developed to calculate the angular distribution of the neutron generation rate.
