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Division Spotlight
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Winter Conference and Expo
November 17–21, 2024
Orlando, FL|Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld
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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September 2024
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August 2024
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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.
Junghyun Bae, Robert S. Bean
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 196 | Number 10 | October 2022 | Pages 1224-1235
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2055700
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In pool-type research reactors, the fuel core is placed in a large open pool of water, and it is consistently cooled by natural circulation. To meet the increasing demands of reactor-based research, i.e., neutron irradiation and isotope production, many institutes have been considering upgrading the designed power levels of their research reactors to maximize their utility. However, increasing operating power levels without replacing the major components of the reactor system is challenging because two important analyses must be extensively performed: (1) neutron transport analysis for nuclear fission and decay heat generation and (2) thermohydraulic analysis for heat removal in the core. In this paper, we investigate thermohydraulic limits on the maximum power of the Purdue University research reactor (PUR-1) using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations which are coupled with the results from Monte Carlo neutron transport simulations. We design a PUR-1 fuel assembly, which is designated as the hottest one for CFD simulations, that includes a narrow, rectangular, and upward coolant channel. Here we demonstrate that the thermohydraulic limit for PUR-1 core power is 350 kW without changing the coolant system. Given a conservative safety margin, however, the estimated maximum power level is decreased to 170 kW. In the end, the results of two additional cooling systems—guide pipe and lowered coolant temperature—are presented to demonstrate the potential of advanced cooling capacity. They would enable reactors to operate at higher core power levels.