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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Latest News
IAEA again raises global nuclear power projections
Noting recent momentum behind nuclear power, the International Atomic Energy Agency has revised up its projections for the expansion of nuclear power, estimating that global nuclear operational capacity will more than double by 2050—reaching 2.6 times the 2024 level—with small modular reactors expected to play a pivotal role in this high-case scenario.
IAEA director general Rafael Mariano Grossi announced the new projections, contained in the annual report Energy, Electricity, and Nuclear Power Estimates for the Period up to 2050 at the 69th IAEA General Conference in Vienna.
In the report’s high-case scenario, nuclear electrical generating capacity is projected to increase to from 377 GW at the end of 2024 to 992 GW by 2050. In a low-case scenario, capacity rises 50 percent, compared with 2024, to 561 GW. SMRs are projected to account for 24 percent of the new capacity added in the high case and for 5 percent in the low case.
Abhishek Saxena, Jan Eiholzer, Harshank Agarwal, Horst-Michael Prasser
Nuclear Technology | Volume 196 | Number 3 | December 2016 | Pages 568-587
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NT16-20
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The thermal-hydraulic design characteristics of a boiling water reactor are strongly dependent on the physics of heat-removing mechanisms from nuclear rods. Performance is often limited by a lack of understanding of the heat and momentum transfer in thin liquid films close to dryout. This is particularly important with regard to power uprates of reactors. Flow control by functional spacers equipped with vanes adds complexity to the flow behavior. Instead of improving the heat removal, they can cause a local reduction of the film thickness under unfavorable conditions. This work presents a novel experimental technique to measure the velocity of the liquid phase and to study the turbulent mixing of a passive scalar in the film. The studies were performed in vertical annular flow in a double-subchannel geometry. The liquid film was labeled by either continuous or pulsed tracer injection. An electrically conductive tracer (salt solution) is injected into the film consisting of deionized water. The salt is traced using a liquid film sensor, a high-frequency nonintrusive conductivity-based technique. The experiments are conducted with and without a swirl-type spacer to quantify the effect of the spacers on the film flow for different gas and liquid flow rates. An ensemble averaging of the data obtained from individual injection pulses provides time-averaged liquid velocities in the film. The turbulent dispersion was characterized by analyzing the spread of the tracer in axial and lateral directions. Spacer vanes are found to induce a characteristic transverse movement of the liquid in the film. The effect of waves on mixing is analyzed and is found to enhance it.