ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
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
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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
TerraPower begins U.K. regulatory approval process
Seattle-based TerraPower signaled its interest this week in building its Natrium small modular reactor in the United Kingdom, the company announced.
TerraPower sent a letter to the U.K.’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, formally establishing its intention to enter the U.K. generic design assessment (GDA) process. This is TerraPower’s first step in deployment of its Natrium technology—a 345-MW sodium fast reactor coupled with a molten salt energy storage unit—on the international stage.
Ralf Wittmaack
Nuclear Technology | Volume 119 | Number 2 | August 1997 | Pages 158-180
Technical Paper | Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow | doi.org/10.13182/NT97-A35384
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
New design features of future reactors are being developed to ensure the integrity of the reactors under severe accident conditions. These features include the spreading of corium with subsequent flooding and cooling. Numerical simulations are performed to reduce the number of necessary large-scale experiments with radioactive material. For this reason, the development, verification, and validation of simulation methods are important foci. A method for predicting three-dimensional free-surface flows of a single-component, incompressible Newtonian fluid is presented. The thermodynamics and discrete phase transitions are simulated also. In addition to the fluid, structural materials are considered as hydrodynamic obstacles and heat structures. The method is applied to several flow, heat transfer, and phase transition problems of water and glycerol and of cerrotru (low-melting Bi-Sn alloy), thermite, and corium melts. The predictions provide a satisfactory representation of the experimental data and analytical solutions. Different physical processes are analyzed, e.g., gravity waves, creeping flows, Bénard convection, and thermodynamic interactions of fluid, structural material, and surroundings. The method is applied to the layout and design of experiments and exvessel corium-retention devices in nuclear reactors.