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Aerospace Nuclear Science & Technology
Organized to promote the advancement of knowledge in the use of nuclear science and technologies in the aerospace application. Specialized nuclear-based technologies and applications are needed to advance the state-of-the-art in aerospace design, engineering and operations to explore planetary bodies in our solar system and beyond, plus enhance the safety of air travel, especially high speed air travel. Areas of interest will include but are not limited to the creation of nuclear-based power and propulsion systems, multifunctional materials to protect humans and electronic components from atmospheric, space, and nuclear power system radiation, human factor strategies for the safety and reliable operation of nuclear power and propulsion plants by non-specialized personnel and more.
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2024 ANS Winter Conference and Expo
November 17–21, 2024
Orlando, FL|Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld
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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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Nuclear new build procurement considerations
It may seem counterintuitive, but the best time to enhance the ability to support operations and maintenance for a new plant is before construction starts. This is one of many lessons learned by the currently operating nuclear fleet. As construction and startup of many nuclear facilities was completed, it quickly became evident that the ability to efficiently support operations and maintenance was limited. Most of the information necessary to establish and manage procurement of spare and replacement items, maintenance, and configuration of the facilities was unavailable and had to be gathered on a case-by-case, “on-demand” basis. Absence of necessary information and the associated challenges resulted in the need for staff augmentation and multiyear-long projects to develop equipment bills of material and maintenance programs and to perform technical evaluations for the huge quantities of spare and replacement items being requested.
Marianna Papadionysiou, Kim Seongchan, Mathieu Hursin, Alexander Vasiliev, Hakim Ferroukhi, Andreas Pautz, Han Gyu Joo
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 194 | Number 11 | November 2020 | Pages 1056-1066
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1753418
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The current standard for computational neutronic analysis of nuclear power plants (NPPs) is the so-called conventional approach, which relies on few-group, coarse-mesh diffusion calculations. The recent evolution of computing clusters and computational techniques gives the opportunity to use codes that perform first principles–based multiphysics simulations, allowing high resolution of the calculated parameters. The goal of this work is to assess the performance of the deterministic high-resolution transport code nTRACER and the nodal code PARCS on the basis of VVER core configurations. The V1000-2D benchmarks of the NUclear REactor SIMulation (NURESIM) project framework are used to provide the neutronic and modeling data as well as reference solutions for both codes. A reference solution is also generated using Serpent2. The accuracy and limitations of the codes are illustrated together with their computational requirements. PARCS shows good agreement with the reference solutions although the results present some discrepancies due to the provided discontinuity factors. nTRACER is capable of producing high-accuracy and high-resolution solutions in a fraction of the time required by the Monte Carlo solver.