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Division Spotlight
Fusion Energy
This division promotes the development and timely introduction of fusion energy as a sustainable energy source with favorable economic, environmental, and safety attributes. The division cooperates with other organizations on common issues of multidisciplinary fusion science and technology, conducts professional meetings, and disseminates technical information in support of these goals. Members focus on the assessment and resolution of critical developmental issues for practical fusion energy applications.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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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May 2025
Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
Robert K. Salko, William D. Pointer, Marc-Oliver Delchini, William L. Gurecky, Kevin T. Clarno, Stuart R. Salttery, Victor Petrov, Annalisa Manera
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 12 | December 2019 | Pages 1697-1706
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1585734
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors is developing a core simulator capability known as the Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications (VERA) to address nuclear industry challenge problems such as crud-induced power shift (CIPS). The CTF thermal-hydraulic (T/H) subchannel code provides thermal feedback in the coupled neutronics, T/H, crud chemistry simulation that VERA performs. It has been discovered that the coarse meshing approach used by CTF (in which fuel rods are discretized into four azimuthal segments) can be a source of error in predicting crud growth and boron distribution in VERA CIPS calculations. Spacer grid effects lead to complex rod-to-fluid heat transfer behavior that, when not resolved, can lead to error in the prediction of crud growth and boron deposition. A higher-fidelity computational fluid dynamics approach can be used instead of CTF, but this leads to excessive simulation times. This paper presents an approach for using high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics data to create shape functions that are used in CTF to reconstruct rod surface heat transfer behavior as a function of spacer grid geometry. The approach is demonstrated for a 5 × 5 rod bundle facility with five mixing vane grids under a range of operating conditions encountered in nominal pressurized water reactor conditions. It is demonstrated that the grid heat transfer maps are successful at introducing a higher-fidelity heat transfer modeling capability into CTF.