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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.
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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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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Latest News
Norway’s Halden reactor takes first step toward decommissioning
The government of Norway has granted the transfer of the Halden research reactor from the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) to the state agency Norwegian Nuclear Decommissioning (NND). The 25-MWt Halden boiling water reactor operated from 1958 to 2018 and was used in the research of nuclear fuel, reactor internals, plant procedures and monitoring, and human factors.
Tatjana Jevremovic, Yoshiaki Oka, Sei-Ichi Koshizuka
Nuclear Technology | Volume 114 | Number 3 | June 1996 | Pages 273-284
Technical Paper | Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35232
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The core design of a fast converter reactor adopting enriched UO2 fuel is studied for maximizing the power rating of the direct-cycle, supercritical water-cooled fast reactor with the same reactor pressure vessel as the breeder and mixed-oxide (MOX) fueled converter. The coolant void reactivity is kept negative by placing thin zirconium-hydride layers in the blanket fuel assemblies facing the driver fuels, as in our fast breeder reactor design. Compared with the fast converter adopting MOX fuel, the electric power output is increased 11%, from 1444 to 1625 MW(electric). It is attained by the reduced blanket fuel fraction for keeping negative reactivity at coolant voiding. The positive reactivity at flooding the core is much larger than that of the MOX core, but it can be managed by the control rod system. The conversion ratio, the surviving ratio, is 0.85, reduced 0.1 from that of the MOX converter. The enrichment of UO2fuel reaches 16.9%. The specific fissile inventory is the highest, compared with the MOX-fueled converter and breeder due to the lower fission cross sections of 235U. The cores of the supercritical water-cooled reactors are radially heterogeneous. The decoupling problem is, however, much smaller than that of the liquid-metal fast breeder reactor due to the smaller core diameter. The hydrogen loss from the zirconium hydrides at steady state and accidental conditions does not impose a problem.