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Division Spotlight
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.
Meeting Spotlight
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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Latest News
El Salvador: Looking to nuclear
In 2022, El Salvador’s leadership decided to expand its modest, mostly hydro- and geothermal-based electricity system, which is supported by expensive imported natural gas and diesel generation. They chose to use advanced nuclear reactors, preferably fueled by thorium-based fuels, to power their civilian efforts. The choice of thorium was made to inform the world that the reactor program was for civilian purposes only, and so they chose a fuel that was plentiful, easy to source and work with, and not a proliferation risk.
Olivier Bardon, Ludovic Garnier
Nuclear Technology | Volume 201 | Number 2 | February 2018 | Pages 103-112
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1409054
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Used nuclear fuel transportation casks are subjected to a permanent heat load that must be released in the air by passive dissipation as natural convection and infrared radiation. Because of the large size of the cask, natural convection operates in nonisothermal conditions at very high Rayleigh numbers where few experimental works exist and where computational fluid dynamics codes are often not representative. Thermal tests are then needed to estimate and check thermal designs. This work is a starting point of a research and development program that aims to improve the knowledge of natural convective heat transfer around casks, to explain the effect of a design parameter such as fins, and finally to propose and check improved solutions. In this work, we present the qualification of a mock-up that has been set up to measure the local heat convective coefficient of a fin-equipped cask in transport conditions. The geometry concerns short axial fins that are widely used on transportation/storage casks. The first results show a large variation of the heat convective coefficient along the cask from a constant low level at the bottom and then a linearly increasing level leading to a maximum value close to the top that is strongly temperature dependent.