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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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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Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
Ji-Hwan Hwang (Chung-Ang Univ), Min Ho Lee, In Cheol Bang (UNIST), Dong-Wook Jerng (Chung-Ang Univ)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 650-656
A concept of the ERVC (External Reactor Vessel Cooling) can be applied to the Sodium Fast Reactor (SFR), by using air instead of water as a coolant. The RVCS, which is a system to maintain integrity of concrete structures, can be used for reactor exterior surface cooling. The heat removal by RVCS operation affects and affected by the natural circulation inside sodium pool. Thus, understanding the natural circulation inside sodium pool is important for RVCS performance prediction. In this paper, we numerically investigated similarity laws to figure out the applicability of water tests to actual sodium condition using a commercial CFD code, STAR-CCM+. In this study, 4 different scales, 1/20, 1/10, 1/8 and 1/5 were investigated. In every case the volumetric heat flux of core was identical. For numerical simulation, the geometry and configuration of Prototype Gen-IV Sodium Cooled Fast Reactor (PGFSR) developed in KAERI is chosen as reference, and modeled. For comparison, each similarity laws were compared in terms of temperature field. The simulation and comparison results show that by preserving modified Bousinessq number and Peclet number when reducing the test, the temperature field of reactor can be reproduced. However, the test is too small, the flow resistance due to internal structure acts dominantly, disturbing the flow. Therefore, for better result, such flow resistance which can be occurs at small-scaled experiment, should be taken into account.