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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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Latest News
IAEA again raises global nuclear power projections
Noting recent momentum behind nuclear power, the International Atomic Energy Agency has revised up its projections for the expansion of nuclear power, estimating that global nuclear operational capacity will more than double by 2050—reaching 2.6 times the 2024 level—with small modular reactors expected to play a pivotal role in this high-case scenario.
IAEA director general Rafael Mariano Grossi announced the new projections, contained in the annual report Energy, Electricity, and Nuclear Power Estimates for the Period up to 2050 at the 69th IAEA General Conference in Vienna.
In the report’s high-case scenario, nuclear electrical generating capacity is projected to increase to from 377 GW at the end of 2024 to 992 GW by 2050. In a low-case scenario, capacity rises 50 percent, compared with 2024, to 561 GW. SMRs are projected to account for 24 percent of the new capacity added in the high case and for 5 percent in the low case.
Aya Diab, Michael Corradini, Carl Martin
Nuclear Technology | Volume 169 | Number 2 | February 2010 | Pages 114-125
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-A9356
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Pressurized heavy water reactors of the CANDU design may be susceptible to a partial or a complete blockage of the flow of coolant to some of the pressure tubes. This event, although very rare, would result from the presence of debris in the heat transport conduits. In the case of an extreme event where the coolant flow is blocked completely, in addition to failure to scram the reactor, an accident scenario may prevail. Coolant trapped in the pressure tube is expected to boil off; the fuel rods would overheat and partially melt with the melt accumulating at the bottom of the pressure tube. This degraded situation, along with the high pressure involved under normal operation conditions, would lead to a rupture of the pressure tube. The pressure signature at the rupture site predicted from a lumped parameter phenomenological model is used as an input to a three-dimensional ANSYS model to assess the pressure signature at the inner walls of the tank in response to the pressure tube rupture. The pressure predicted by the ANSYS model is benchmarked against experimental data from the literature.