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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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Shifting the paradigm of supply chain
Chad Wolf
When I began my nuclear career, I was coached up in the nuclear energy culture of the day to “run silent, run deep,” a mindset rooted in the U.S. Navy’s submarine philosophy. That was the norm—until Fukushima.
The nuclear renaissance that many had envisioned hit a wall. The focus shifted from expansion to survival. Many utility communications efforts pivoted from silence to broadcast, showcasing nuclear energy’s elegance and reliability. Nevertheless, despite being clean baseload 24/7 power that delivered a 90 percent capacity factor or higher, nuclear energy was painted as risky and expensive (alongside energy policies and incentives that favored renewables).
Economics became a driving force threatening to shutter nuclear power. The Delivering the Nuclear Promise initiative launched in 2015 challenged the industry to sustain high performance yet cut costs by up to 30 percent.
Jin-Seok Hwang, Jong-Won Kim, Heon-Uk Nam, Goon-Cherl Park
Nuclear Technology | Volume 176 | Number 2 | November 2011 | Pages 260-273
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A13300
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A major safety factor in marine reactor design, critical heat flux (CHF), is assessed using the MARS system analysis code under heaving conditions. As gravity acceleration changes, the CHF is affected by the thermal hydraulics in the reactor through inlet flow fluctuations. Performing the analysis with the MARS code, which uses the properties of water for the working fluid, requires applying the CHF experimental data using fluid-to-fluid (FTF) scaling because most CHF experiments are conducted with Freon (R-113) as the working fluid. The FTF scaling methods suggested by Ahmad, Katto, and Coffield are adopted and compared. Otsuji et al.'s experiment, which was conducted using mass flow rate oscillation, is applied to evaluate the capability of MARS for heaving conditions. According to the calculations the FTF methods of Ahmad, Katto, and Coffield show good agreement (within an error of ±10.73% for Otsuji et al.'s experiment) for inlet flow rate oscillation corresponding to gravity acceleration in a vertical direction. In addition, variation of the acceleration affects the flow conditions, such as the mass flow rate and the void fraction. Thus, MARS has a noteworthy ability to predict the CHF for heaving conditions by simulating inlet flow rate oscillation.