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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.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Winter Conference and Expo
November 17–21, 2024
Orlando, FL|Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld
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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2024
Nuclear Technology
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August 2024
Latest News
Nuclear new build procurement considerations
It may seem counterintuitive, but the best time to enhance the ability to support operations and maintenance for a new plant is before construction starts. This is one of many lessons learned by the currently operating nuclear fleet. As construction and startup of many nuclear facilities was completed, it quickly became evident that the ability to efficiently support operations and maintenance was limited. Most of the information necessary to establish and manage procurement of spare and replacement items, maintenance, and configuration of the facilities was unavailable and had to be gathered on a case-by-case, “on-demand” basis. Absence of necessary information and the associated challenges resulted in the need for staff augmentation and multiyear-long projects to develop equipment bills of material and maintenance programs and to perform technical evaluations for the huge quantities of spare and replacement items being requested.
Allan K. Järvine, Alan G. Murchison, Peter G. Keech, Mahesh D. Pandey
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 7 | July 2020 | Pages 1036-1058
Regular Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1700730
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Lifetime predictions of used nuclear fuel containers (UFCs) destined for permanent storage in deep geological repositories are challenged by the uncertainty surrounding the environment and resultant performance of both the containers and the balance of engineered barriers over repository timescales. Much of the work to characterize the response of engineered barriers to postulated evolving environmental conditions and degradation mechanisms is limited to very short-term laboratory tests or at best in situ large-scale experiments spanning less than a few decades. While much is learned from these test programs, the fact remains that long-term performance of many tens of thousands of UFCs across a timescale of 100 000 years or more cannot be estimated with a significant degree of confidence by extrapolating single-point results of short-term experiments. This is particularly true when there is a desire to understand the progression of container failures and the timing of contaminants subsequently released into the geosphere. Lifetime predictions for UFCs require a probabilistic approach to address uncertainty. In the present work, a recently developed probabilistic corrosion model to estimate the life expectancy of copper-coated UFCs destined for a Canadian geological repository is expanded by modeling the impact of latent copper-coating defects and repository temperature on the key container life-limiting mechanism: sulfide-induced corrosion.