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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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Colin Judge: Testing structural materials in Idaho’s newest hot cell facility
Idaho National Laboratory’s newest facility—the Sample Preparation Laboratory (SPL)—sits across the road from the Hot Fuel Examination Facility (HFEF), which started operating in 1975. SPL will host the first new hot cells at INL’s Materials and Fuels Complex (MFC) in 50 years, giving INL researchers and partners new flexibility to test the structural properties of irradiated materials fresh from the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) or from a partner’s facility.
Materials meant to withstand extreme conditions in fission or fusion power plants must be tested under similar conditions and pushed past their breaking points so performance and limitations can be understood and improved. Once irradiated, materials samples can be cut down to size in SPL and packaged for testing in other facilities at INL or other national laboratories, commercial labs, or universities. But they can also be subjected to extreme thermal or corrosive conditions and mechanical testing right in SPL, explains Colin Judge, who, as INL’s division director for nuclear materials performance, oversees SPL and other facilities at the MFC.
SPL won’t go “hot” until January 2026, but Judge spoke with NN staff writer Susan Gallier about its capabilities as his team was moving instruments into the new facility.
Hyung-Kook Joo, Temitope A. Taiwo, Won Sik Yang, Hussein S. Khalil
Nuclear Technology | Volume 161 | Number 1 | January 2008 | Pages 8-26
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT08-A3909
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An evaluation of the Compact Nuclear Power Source (CNPS) experiments conducted at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1980s has been done using information available in the open literature. The MCNP4C Monte Carlo results for critical test configurations are in good agreement with the experimental values; the keff values are generally within 0.5% of the experimental values. The calculated total and differential rod worths and material worths were also found generally close to experimental values. These good results motivated the utilization of the experimental test data for the specification of two- and three-dimensional numerical benchmark cases that could be used for the verification and validation of core physics codes developed for Very High Temperature Reactor (VHTR) analysis, particularly the deterministic lattice and whole-core physics codes. To define the benchmark cases, the irregular arrangement of channels in the actual CNPS core was simplified to a regular Cartesian geometry arrangement in the benchmark cases, while preserving the important neutronics characteristics of the CNPS. The results of deterministic calculations using the HELIOS/DIF3D code package were compared to MCNP4C results to show the usefulness of the numerical benchmark cases.
