ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
Jan 2026
Jul 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
February 2026
Nuclear Technology
December 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
November 2025
Latest News
LIS Technologies to invest $1.38B in Oak Ridge
On January 16, Tenn. Gov. Bill Lee, Deputy Gov. Stuart McWhorter, and officials from Laser Isotope Separation Technologies announced the company’s plans to expand in Oak Ridge, Tenn. That expansion will come with a $1.38 billion investment from LIS Technologies for what the company says will be the first commercial laser uranium enrichment plant in the United States.
Adam R. Kraus, Elia Merzari, Mathieu Martin, Dustin Langewisch, Yassin Hassan
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 198 | Number 7 | July 2024 | Pages 1455-1476
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2255463
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Flow circulation and heat removal through shield and reflector assemblies can have major impacts on safety in long transients for sodium fast reactors (SFRs). These transients are typically categorized by reduced flow rates and large-scale organized flow patterns, including potential intra-assembly circulation. Such low-flow cases can provide challenges for experiments because of complications in measuring the flow rates and temperatures with high accuracy in different areas. This consequently also raises the uncertainty of many modeling approaches for these phenomena. In an effort to address some of these issues, high-fidelity large eddy simulations are performed using the highly parallel solver NekRS. A 19-pin configuration of a tight-lattice wire-wrapped hexagonal bundle (pitch-to-diameter ratio = 1.07), representing a prototypical internal configuration of a shield assembly, was investigated. The sodium flow was set at a bundle Reynolds number of 2000, with simulations being performed for modified Richardson numbers of 0.0 (i.e., no buoyancy), 0.01, and 0.04, where mixed-convection effects are anticipated. The flow and temperature fields for these cases are discussed in detail. The high-fidelity data should prove useful as reference data for expanding and improving on various reduced-resolution approaches. A basic framework for combining subchannel and computational fluid dynamics methodologies in SFRs is also presented, with preliminary results from simulations of light water reactor bundles and a discussion of changes that need to be made for potential application to SFRs.