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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 8–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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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Japan gets new U for enrichment as global power and fuel plans grow
President Trump is in Japan today, with a visit with new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi on the agenda. Takaichi, who took office just last week as Japan’s first female prime minister, has already spoken in favor of nuclear energy and of accelerating the restart of Japan’s long-shuttered power reactors, as Reuters and others have reported. Much of the uranium to power those reactors will be enriched at Japan’s lone enrichment facility—part of Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd.’s Rokkasho fuel complex—which accepted its first delivery of fresh uranium hexafluoride (UF₆) in 11 years earlier this month.
Dan G. Cacuci, Ruixian Fang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 198 | Number 2 | May 2017 | Pages 85-131
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1294429
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For counter-flow mechanical draft cooling towers, the air in the fill can reach the point of saturation before leaving the fill section. The heat and mass transfer to the saturated air by evaporative cooling inside the fill are modeled with some assumptions and with over 50 parameters for boundary conditions, cooling tower geometries, heat and mass transfer correlations, water and air thermal properties, etc. Because of the parameter uncertainties and modeling assumptions, the accuracy and reliability of the cooling tower model need to be evaluated by quantifying the uncertainties associated with the model output. First, sensitivities of the model output with respect to all the model parameters need to be analyzed. Based on the cooling tower model, this work developed adjoint sensitivity models for the saturated case to compute efficiently and exactly the sensitivities of the model responses to all model parameters by applying the general adjoint sensitivity analysis methodology for nonlinear systems. The solution of the adjoint sensitivity models are independently verified. With the sensitivities known, the model parameters can be ranked in their importance for contributing to response uncertainties. The propagation of the uncertainties in the model parameters to the uncertainties in the model outputs can be evaluated. By further applying the predictive modeling for coupled multiphysics systems methodology, the cooling tower model for the saturated case can be improved by reducing the model prediction uncertainties through assimilation of experimental measurements and calibration of model parameters.