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Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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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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.
Afaque Shams, Dante De Santis, Adam Padee, Piotr Wasiuk, Tobiasz Jarosiewicz, Tomasz Kwiatkowski, Sławomir Potempski
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 2 | February 2020 | Pages 283-295
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1642683
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Large-scale computations play an important role in many engineering and scientific applications. In the nuclear field, in particular, the crucial need for accurate simulations and reliable reference data for validation purposes makes high-fidelity simulations an extremely important tool. Due to the too-large computational resources required, these simulations must be performed on dedicated computational facilities. This paper focuses on the description of the high-performance computing facility at the Świerk Computing Centre (CIŚ) in Poland. More specifically, the hardware configuration, software used for on-demand deployment of dedicated subclusters, and queuing systems are described. The computational capabilities at the CIŚ are assessed by performing scalability tests with the massive parallel code NEK5000. The tests assess the influence of the CPU architecture, cooling infrastructure, and interconnection performance on the solver running times. Subsequently, selected applications are presented. These applications concern the direct numerical simulations of mixed convection and fluid flow in a rod bundle. The mean velocity and temperature, the root mean square of the velocity components, and the novel results related to the budgets of turbulent kinetic energy as well the budgets of the wall-normal and streamwise turbulent heat flux are reported for different Prandtl numbers for the mixed convection case. For the rod bundle case an instantaneous temperature for the isothermal and isoflux boundary conditions is reported. Moreover, the frequency of the velocity pulsation has been computed.