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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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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Empowering the next generation: ANS’s newest book focuses on careers in nuclear energy
A new career guide for the nuclear energy industry is now available: The Nuclear Empowered Workforce by Earnestine Johnson. Drawing on more than 30 years of experience across 16 nuclear facilities, Johnson offers a practical, insightful look into some of the many career paths available in commercial nuclear power. To mark the release, Johnson sat down with Nuclear News for a wide-ranging conversation about her career, her motivation for writing the book, and her advice for the next generation of nuclear professionals.
When Johnson began her career at engineering services company Stone & Webster, she entered a field still reeling from the effects of the Three Mile Island incident in 1979, nearly 15 years earlier. Her hiring cohort was the first group of new engineering graduates the company had brought on since TMI, a reflection of the industry-wide pause in nuclear construction. Her first long-term assignment—at the Millstone site in Waterford, Conn., helping resolve design issues stemming from TMI—marked the beginning of a long and varied career that spanned positions across the country.
Adam R. Kraus, Elia Merzari
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 198 | Number 7 | July 2024 | Pages 1477-1496
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2024.2318837
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Fast and accurate evaluation of flow and heat transfer phenomena in rod bundles is a problem of long-standing interest in nuclear engineering. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) can provide accurate but relatively time-intensive estimates, such that simulations of very long transients with high spatial detail are infeasible. On the other hand, subchannel codes require relatively low computational time and can provide pin-level estimates, but have substantial empiricism in evaluating aspects such as crossflows and turbulent mixing coefficients.
A multiscale method (SC+) for bridging this accuracy/speed gap, based on the Subchannel CFD (SubChCFD) method of Liu et al. [Nucl. Eng. Design, Vol. 355, paper 110318 (2019)], is demonstrated and developed here with a focus on a 5 × 5 square rod bundle geometry. The method has been newly implemented into the commercial code STAR-CCM+ and benchmarked against Liu et al.’s data. The 5 × 5 geometry was chosen in part due to the availability of direct numerical simulation (DNS) data at a relevant Reynolds number of a similar configuration for comparison.
The SC+ results are variously compared against results from DNS, large eddy simulation, wall-resolved Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes, and coarse-mesh CFD methods. As an expansion to the original SubChCFD approach, a simple Hi2Lo approach is demonstrated using the DNS data as a correction to the original friction factor correlations employed. This is verified to improve the predictions.
Additional test cases with geometric perturbations are pursued, illustrating the flexibility of SC+. The potential of this method for modeling the narrow gap vortex instability, which would represent an advancement over standard subchannel approaches, is also assessed. The method is expanded to include transverse flow losses, which was found to improve the results for modeling the gap instability.
Initial extensions of SC+ for hexagonal rod bundles are also presented; some inaccuracies for the coarsest meshes prompted a detailed investigation of the mesh convergence behavior of the method. Geometric correction factors were devised that provided substantial improvement on these very coarse meshes, improving the prospects of SC+ for wider usage.
Future work plans are to expand the methodology to wire-wrapped rod bundles and to implement the method into Pronghorn, with a unified pipeline via the Cardinal wrapper between the codes NekRS, Pronghorn, and BISON, to solve fuel performance problems of direct interest to industry.
