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Division Spotlight
Accelerator Applications
The division was organized to promote the advancement of knowledge of the use of particle accelerator technologies for nuclear and other applications. It focuses on production of neutrons and other particles, utilization of these particles for scientific or industrial purposes, such as the production or destruction of radionuclides significant to energy, medicine, defense or other endeavors, as well as imaging and diagnostics.
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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May 2025
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April 2025
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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.
Jieun Lee, Paolo Balestra, Yassin A. Hassan, Robert Muyshondt, Duy Thien Nguyen, Richard Skifton
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 12 | December 2022 | Pages 1769-1805
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2081482
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The verification and validation of Pronghorn is imperative for predicting the fluid velocity, pressure, and temperature in advanced reactors, specifically high-temperature gas-cooled reactors. Pronghorn is a coarse-mesh, intermediate-fidelity, multidimensional thermal-hydraulic code developed by Idaho National Laboratory. The Pronghorn incompressible Navier-Stokes equations are validated by using the pressure drop measurements and axial velocity averaged from the particle image velocimetry data obtained at the engineering-scale pebble bed facility at Texas A&M University.
Pronghorn and STAR-CCM+ porous media models using the Handley, Kerntechnischer Ausschuss, and Carman correlations comparably estimate the pressure drop better than other functions with a maximum 3.34% average relative difference compared to the experimental measurements. The precise average pebble bed porosity estimation has a large impact on the pressure drop. The implementation of the volume-averaged porosity in several sectors, with each sector’s thickness larger than the representative elementary length, has the potential to improve pressure drop modeling or provide more detailed velocity profiles in nuclear reactors with high aspect ratios. The wall effects can be considered using this approach, applying the relatively higher volume-averaged porosity near walls. In addition, the pressure gradients and volume- or surface-averaged axial velocities from the realizable two-layer and shear stress transport models are in good agreement with the porous media simulations and particle image velocimetry data.