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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.
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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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Colin Judge: Testing structural materials in Idaho’s newest hot cell facility
Idaho National Laboratory’s newest facility—the Sample Preparation Laboratory (SPL)—sits across the road from the Hot Fuel Examination Facility (HFEF), which started operating in 1975. SPL will host the first new hot cells at INL’s Materials and Fuels Complex (MFC) in 50 years, giving INL researchers and partners new flexibility to test the structural properties of irradiated materials fresh from the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) or from a partner’s facility.
Materials meant to withstand extreme conditions in fission or fusion power plants must be tested under similar conditions and pushed past their breaking points so performance and limitations can be understood and improved. Once irradiated, materials samples can be cut down to size in SPL and packaged for testing in other facilities at INL or other national laboratories, commercial labs, or universities. But they can also be subjected to extreme thermal or corrosive conditions and mechanical testing right in SPL, explains Colin Judge, who, as INL’s division director for nuclear materials performance, oversees SPL and other facilities at the MFC.
SPL won’t go “hot” until January 2026, but Judge spoke with NN staff writer Susan Gallier about its capabilities as his team was moving instruments into the new facility.
A. Bujan, B. Tóth, A. Bieliauskas, R. Zeyen, C. Housiadas
Nuclear Technology | Volume 169 | Number 1 | January 2010 | Pages 1-17
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-A9339
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Phébus FP tests study the phenomenology of severe accidents in water-cooled nuclear reactors. The first test, FPT0, was performed with fuel irradiated for only 1 week; the second test, FPT1, was performed with fairly similar boundary conditions but with irradiated fuel (burnup: 23 GWd/t). The objective of this work is, on the one hand, to summarize the main experimental results of these two tests concerning the behavior and transport of fission products and structural materials in the circuit and, on the other hand, to identify or to confirm any modeling weaknesses in the SOPHAEROS/ASTEC V1 module used for interpreting the experimental results. Besides comparison with available experimental data, the main results of the entire circuit analyses are compared with former SOPHAEROS/ASTEC V0 analyses and, for so-called quasi-separated steam generator tubes, with one- and two-dimensional Eulerian and Lagrangian (particle tracking) models.Concerning the transport of iodine vapor species, it is shown that the results obtained are compatible with passage of nonnegligible amounts of the measured highly volatile iodine through circuit to containment. It is also shown that these results depend heavily on the considered kinetics of Cd release from the bundle.