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
Apr 2026
Jan 2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
May 2026
Nuclear Technology
February 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Westinghouse submits AP1000 design revision to NRC
Yesterday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that it has received an application from Westinghouse to renew and update the design certification (DC) for its AP1000 reactor. This application seeks to formally incorporate the lessons learned from the construction of Vogtle-3 and -4 into the design control document (DCD) of the AP1000.
This long-expected submittal builds on previous plans at both the NRC and Westinghouse for the future of gigawatt-scale light water reactor deployments in the United States.
M. Rashid, S. Rahman, R. Kulenovic, M. Bürger, E. Laurien
Nuclear Technology | Volume 181 | Number 1 | January 2013 | Pages 208-215
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the 14th International Topical Meeting on Nuclear Reactor Thermal Hydraulics (NURETH-14) / Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A15768
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the case of a severe accident, continuous unavailability of cooling water to the core will result in overheating and subsequent meltdown of the fuel elements that would eventually result in the loss of fuel integrity. Under such conditions a porous structure, which is made of heat-generating particles of different sizes and shapes, may be formed. The presence of decay heat in such a debris bed poses a critical threat to the reactor pressure vessel (RPV). To avoid any damage to the RPV, the removal of decay heat from the debris bed is of great importance. The debris bed needs to be quenched by water either flooding from the top or flooding from the bottom until continuous cooling is established. To investigate the quenching behavior of the debris bed by means of experiments, the nonnuclear test facility "DEBRIS" has been established at Institut für Kernenergetik und Energiesysteme (IKE). Experimental investigations of quenching behavior for a preheated debris bed, at various initial bed temperatures, are carried out at IKE. In the new quenching tests, the cooling-down behavior of a superheated polydispersed particle bed from stainless steel spheres at different thermohydraulic conditions has been investigated. Numerical investigation with IKE's MEWA-2D code has also been carried out for the quenching experiments in order to promote better understanding of the experimental results as well as to verify the code's applicability to the quenching process.