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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
Meeting Spotlight
Utility Working Conference and Vendor Technology Expo (UWC 2024)
August 4–7, 2024
Marco Island, FL|JW Marriott Marco Island
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
Vogtle-3 shuts down for valve issue
One of the new Vogtle units in Georgia was shut down unexpectedly on Monday last week for a valve issue that has since been investigated and repaired. According to multiple local news outlets, Georgia Power reported on July 17 that Unit 3 was back in service.
Southern Company spokesperson Jacob Hawkins confirmed that Vogtle-3 went off line at 9:25 p.m. local time on July 8 “due to lowering water levels in the steam generators caused by a valve issue on one of the three main feedwater pumps.”
Serge Bellet, Nicolas Goreaud, Norbert Nicaise
Nuclear Technology | Volume 152 | Number 2 | November 2005 | Pages 196-209
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT05-A3670
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The thermal-hydraulic design of the first pressurized water reactors was mainly based on an experimental approach, with a large series of tests on the main equipment [control rod guide tubes, reactor pressure vessel (RPV) plenums, etc.] to check performance.Development of computational fluid dynamics codes and computers now allows for complex simulations of hydraulics phenomena. Provided adequate qualification, these numerical tools are an efficient means to determine hydraulics in the given design and to perform sensitivities for optimization of new designs. Experiments always play their role, first for qualification and then for validation at the last stage of the design. The design of the European Pressurized Water Reactor (EPR), jointly developed by Framatome ANP, Electricité de France (EDF), and the German utilities, is based on both hydraulics calculations and experiments handled in a complementary approach.This paper describes the collective effort launched by Framatome ANP and EDF on hydraulics calculations for the RPV of the EPR. It concerns three-dimensional calculations of RPV inlets, including the cold legs, the RPV downcomer and lower plenum, and the RPV upper plenum up to and including the hot legs. It covers normal operating conditions but also accidental conditions such as pressurized thermal shock in a small-break loss-of-coolant accident. Those hydraulics studies have provided much useful information for the mechanical design of RPV internals.