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Robotics & Remote Systems
The Mission of the Robotics and Remote Systems Division is to promote the development and application of immersive simulation, robotics, and remote systems for hazardous environments for the purpose of reducing hazardous exposure to individuals, reducing environmental hazards and reducing the cost of performing work.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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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Latest News
Commercial nuclear innovation "new space" age
In early 2006, a start-up company launched a small rocket from a tiny island in the Pacific. It exploded, showering the island with debris. A year later, a second launch attempt sent a rocket to space but failed to make orbit, burning up in the atmosphere. Another year brought a third attempt—and a third failure. The following month, in September 2008, the company used the last of its funds to launch a fourth rocket. It reached orbit, making history as the first privately funded liquid-fueled rocket to do so.
Ian Porter, Travis W. Knight, Patrick Raynaud
Nuclear Technology | Volume 190 | Number 2 | May 2015 | Pages 174-182
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT14-100
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Nuclear reactor systems codes have the ability to model the system response in an accident scenario based on known initial conditions (ICs) at the onset of the transient. However, there has been a tendency for these codes to lack the detailed thermomechanical fuel rod response models needed for best-estimate prediction of fuel rod failure. Alternatively, the reverse can be said about fuel performance codes; they can lack the ability to capture and model the thermal-hydraulic (T-H) influence of adjacent fuel rods and the rod's location in the reactor core. This work analyzes the limitations in using fuel performance codes to represent in-reactor conditions as determined by full-core T-H codes. The codes used in this analysis are the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's steady-state fuel performance code FRAPCON-3.5 and T-H code TRACE-V5P3. In order to assess the impact of the limitations found in the codes, several modifications were made to all of the codes to improve code-to-code consistency. The modifications to the fuel performance code include adding the ability to model gamma-ray heating and providing realistic core coolant conditions. The T-H code modifications include adding the ability to model the fuel with axially varying burnup-dependent fuel and cladding dimensional changes and corrosion characteristics. The fuel in a Westinghouse four-loop pressurized water reactor was modeled to assess the impacts these modifications have on fuel performance and ICs for transient analysis. The results of this study show that current modeling assumptions (and limitations) can yield both conservative and nonconservative results on several important licensing criteria.