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Division Spotlight
Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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Glass strategy: Hanford’s enhanced waste glass program
The mission of the Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection (ORP) is to complete the safe cleanup of waste resulting from decades of nuclear weapons development. One of the most technologically challenging responsibilities is the safe disposition of approximately 56 million gallons of radioactive waste historically stored in 177 tanks at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
ORP has a clear incentive to reduce the overall mission duration and cost. One pathway is to develop and deploy innovative technical solutions that can advance baseline flow sheets toward higher efficiency operations while reducing identified risks without compromising safety. Vitrification is the baseline process that will convert both high-level and low-level radioactive waste at Hanford into a stable glass waste form for long-term storage and disposal.
Although vitrification is a mature technology, there are key areas where technology can further reduce operational risks, advance baseline processes to maximize waste throughput, and provide the underpinning to enhance operational flexibility; all steps in reducing mission duration and cost.
Hiral Kadakia, Andrew Baker, Mark Paulsen
Nuclear Technology | Volume 202 | Number 1 | April 2018 | Pages 71-80
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1419785
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
RETRAN-3D is a versatile and reliable best-estimate five-equation thermal-hydraulic analysis code used for anticipated operational occurrences and for small-break loss-of-coolant accidents transient analysis of light water reactor systems. The RETRAN-3D accumulator model has been revised to predict behavior during short-intermediate and long-term transients in pressurized water reactors. The accumulator is a single-volume, two-region nonequilibrium component model that includes vessel geometry, wall metal mass, and wall and liquid region surface areas as a function of level. The model accounts for heat transfer effects from the vessel wall to the vapor region using a lumped parameter model and accounts for heat transfer from the liquid region to the gas region. Mass and energy balance equations are solved for the liquid region, and an energy equation is solved for the vapor region. A pressure equation of state provides the pressure as a function of the mass and energy of the liquid and vapor regions.
The new model is validated with loss-of-fluid test and semiscale experimental data, demonstrating that the model is capable of predicting the behavior of an accumulator for transients ranging from short term to long term and accounts for the effects of accumulator geometry such as surface area-to-volume ratio.