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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 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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Shifting the paradigm of supply chain
Chad Wolf
When I began my nuclear career, I was coached up in the nuclear energy culture of the day to “run silent, run deep,” a mindset rooted in the U.S. Navy’s submarine philosophy. That was the norm—until Fukushima.
The nuclear renaissance that many had envisioned hit a wall. The focus shifted from expansion to survival. Many utility communications efforts pivoted from silence to broadcast, showcasing nuclear energy’s elegance and reliability. Nevertheless, despite being clean baseload 24/7 power that delivered a 90 percent capacity factor or higher, nuclear energy was painted as risky and expensive (alongside energy policies and incentives that favored renewables).
Economics became a driving force threatening to shutter nuclear power. The Delivering the Nuclear Promise initiative launched in 2015 challenged the industry to sustain high performance yet cut costs by up to 30 percent.
Mathieu Hursin, Oskari Pakari, Gregory Perret, Pavel Frajtag, Vincent Lamirand, Imre Pázsit, Victor Dykin, Gabor Por, Henrik Nylén, Andreas Pautz
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 10 | October 2020 | Pages 1566-1583
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1701906
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The possibility of measuring the gas-phase velocity in a two-phase mixture through the use of neutron noise techniques is demonstrated in the zero-power reactor CROCUS of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne. It is the first step toward the experimental validation of an existing theoretical model whose objective is the reconstruction of the void profile in a channel. The use of zero-power research reactors is advantageous due to their clean environment in terms of signal fluctuations. To this end, a channel was installed in the reflector of CROCUS. A two-component mixture is generated inside the channel through the injection of compressed air. The signal fluctuations of neutron detectors located at various axial locations next to the channel are processed to determine the transit time of the gas phase between detectors. Four methods are presented based on the detector signal time series either in the time domain (time correlations between signals) or in the frequency domain (phase of the cross-power spectral density. All four methods returned consistent transit times and similar experimental uncertainty. The largest possible gas injection rates as well as the highest possible neutron flux level improve the visibility of the traveling perturbation and reduce the experimental uncertainty on the transit time for a given acquisition time.