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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
Utility Working Conference and Vendor Technology Expo (UWC 2024)
August 4–7, 2024
Marco Island, FL|JW Marriott Marco Island
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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Jul 2024
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Nuclear Science and Engineering
August 2024
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
ARPA-E announces $40 million to develop transmutation technologies for UNF
The Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) announced $40 million in funding to develop cutting-edge technologies to enable the transmutation of used nuclear fuel into less-radioactive substances. According to ARPA-E, the new initiative addresses one of the agency’s core goals as outlined by Congress: to provide transformative solutions to improve the management, cleanup, and disposal of radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel.
Jorge Gonzalez-Amoros, Marianna Papadionysiou, Seongchan Kim, Han Gyu Joo
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 8 | August 2023 | Pages 1634-1655
Technical papers from: PHYSOR 2022 | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2140577
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The capability of the ESCOT pin-level nuclear reactor core thermal-hydraulic (T/H) code is extended for the multiphysics analysis of hexagonal geometry cores, and its performance is assessed by a code-to-code comparison with COBRA-TF (CTF). ESCOT is an accurate yet fast core T/H solution aimed at high-fidelity and high-resolution multiphysics core analysis in the framework of massively parallel computing platforms. The coupling of ESCOT with the nTRACER direct whole-core calculation code is enhanced for the hexagonal geometry handling needed for VVER core analysis. The lateral momentum terms, the turbulent mixing coefficient values, and the parallelization algorithms are modified to handle hexagonal geometry. The newly implemented ESCOT features are verified by comparing single-assembly and full-core steady-state standalone and coupled solutions for the VVER-1000 benchmark X-2 with CTF results.
The ESCOT and CTF results show differences within an acceptable range in both standalone and coupled calculations. The computing time superiority due to the use of the drift flux model (DFM) of ESCOT over the CTF two-fluid model is corroborated with a speedup factor of 1.5. The use of the DFM together with the axial-radial parallelization capability of ESCOT makes ESCOT an ideal alternative to replace the simplified built-in T/H solver in nTRACER as the coupled simulation results demonstrate.