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Decommissioning & Environmental Sciences
The mission of the Decommissioning and Environmental Sciences (DES) Division is to promote the development and use of those skills and technologies associated with the use of nuclear energy and the optimal management and stewardship of the environment, sustainable development, decommissioning, remediation, reutilization, and long-term surveillance and maintenance of nuclear-related installations, and sites. The target audience for this effort is the membership of the Division, the Society, and the public at large.
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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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Latest News
Norway’s Halden reactor takes first step toward decommissioning
The government of Norway has granted the transfer of the Halden research reactor from the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) to the state agency Norwegian Nuclear Decommissioning (NND). The 25-MWt Halden boiling water reactor operated from 1958 to 2018 and was used in the research of nuclear fuel, reactor internals, plant procedures and monitoring, and human factors.
Bin Zhang, Mengwei Zhang, Cheng Peng, Jianqiang Shan, Baowen Yang, Yonggang Cao, Lixia Ren
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 193 | Number 1 | January-February 2019 | Pages 115-130
Technical Paper - Selected papers from NURETH 2017 | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2018.1514177
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Nuclear reactor severe accidents can lead to the release of a large amount of radioactive material and cause immense disaster to the environment. Based on a heat conduction model, the DEBRIS-HT program for analyzing the heat transfer characteristics of a debris bed after a severe accident of a sodium-cooled fast reactor was developed. The basic methodology of the DEBRIS-HT program is to simplify the complex energy transfer process in the debris bed to a simple heat transfer problem by solving the equivalent thermal conductivity in different situations. In this paper, the models of the DEBRIS-HT code are explained in detail. The comparison between the simulation and experimental results shows that the DEBRIS-HT program can correctly estimate the heat transfer process in the debris bed. In addition, the DEBRIS-HT code is applied to model the core catcher of the China fast reactor. The calculated dryout heat flux of the postulated accident, in which 100% of core melts and drops on the core catcher, agrees well with the prediction result of the Lipinski’s zero-dimensional model. And the error between them is about 10%. The calculated dependence of dryout heat flux on particle size is also in good consistence with the prediction by Lipinski’s zero-dimensional model. Then, the temperature distribution and the temperature excursion of the debris bed during a likely accident are analyzed, which provides significant reference to the severe accident analysis.