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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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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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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.
S. G. Bankoff, S. H. Han
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 85 | Number 4 | December 1983 | Pages 387-395
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE83-A18385
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A necessary condition for a large-scale steam explosion in a core meltdown accident in the light water reactor is the formation of a coarsely predispersed mixture of molten “fuel” and water. Chapman-Jouguet diagrams for tin-water mixtures indicate that thermal detonations at supercritical pressures are possible only with relatively low initial void fractions (<0.15). The present calculations deal with a one-dimensional array of fuel particles falling steadily from the lower tie plate into the lower plenum pool. Radiative heat fluxes turn out to be several times larger than the convective fluxes. Both homogeneous and separated flow models for the steam-water flow relative to the particles are formulated. In both cases the void fraction rapidly rises to above 0.85, and the particle volume fraction also decreases sharply, indicating rapid bed dispersal. This confirms a simpler calculation by Henry and Fauske of water removal from the heating zone, looked upon as a subcooled critical heat flux calculation. It would therefore appear to be very difficult to have an efficient steam explosion on a scale large enough to threaten the containment.