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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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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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.
Man-Shik Song, Paul J. Turinsky
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 101 | Number 2 | February 1989 | Pages 117-132
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE89-A23601
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An improved understanding of boiling film dynamics as it relates to energetic steam explosions during degraded core conditions in light water reactors is developed. Several models have been developed and used to predict the characteristics of film boiling when a molten fuel drop suddenly comes into contact with water. An incompressible model and an approximate compressible model, utilizing Gilmore’s equation, are developed consistent with past works and are determined to have several shortfalls. To improve the treatment of compressibility effects, a model employing Lagrang-ian equations is developed. This improved model predicts that applying an external pressure pulse can make a stable film go unstable and decreasing water subcooling stabilizes film oscillations; both predictions are consistent with experimental observations. However, the improved model predicts stable film boiling at low melt temperatures that cannot support such boiling. Modeling Taylor surface instability effects at the water/steam interface indicates that the surface area change due to this surface instability can stabilize the film oscillations.