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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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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.
Eric Pinton, Bernard Duret, Georges Berthoud
Nuclear Technology | Volume 127 | Number 3 | September 1999 | Pages 332-351
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT99-A3005
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To improve the knowledge of the behavior of a UF6 container during a fire, an experimental project called Tenerife was conducted by the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique. Three tests with UF6 with different kinds of heating and temperature furnaces were carried out. The main information obtained from monitoring temperature and pressure during the heating tests is as follows:1. The presence of a strong thermal contact resistance at the solid UF6-steel interface.2. The rupture of the solid crust at the top of the container, a crust formed during container cooling after filling, for a pressure reaching 1.5 bars (triple point). This leads to the beginning of boiling heat transfer and notably film boiling, followed by transition boiling and nucleate boiling.3. The appearance of the liquid stratification with the beginning of nucleate boiling. It can accelerate the rise in pressure because of the reduction of mass transfer by condensation to the liquid-gas interface. This stratification is preserved with the natural convection regime that replaces the nucleate boiling after the end of heating.4. After rupture of the upper UF6 crust, the pressure increase may be delayed by different wetting of the UF6 on the steel wall.Also, these tests were allowed to build and validate a scenario that has been reproduced in a numerical model.
