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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.
Minghui Chen, Xiaodong Sun (Univ of Michigan), Richard N. Christensen (Univ of Idaho)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 835-843
Printed circuit heat exchangers (PCHEs) are promising to be employed in high-temperature gascooled reactors (HTGRs) due to their compactness and intrinsic characteristics of capable of providing high-temperature and high-pressure heat for industrial applications. In our previous study, a reduced-scale zigzag-channel PCHE was fabricated out of Alloy 617 and its heat transfer and pressure drop characteristics were investigated experimentally in a high-temperature helium test facility. In our current study, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code, STAR-CCM+, was used to simulate the thermalhydraulic performance of the fabricated PCHE with a simplified geometry model. Comparisons between the experimental data and the CFD simulations showed some discrepancies in the pressure drop and heat transfer results, which may be caused by the use of different thermal boundary conditions in the simulations from those in the experiments. The simplified heat exchanger simulation model was divided into eight segments to identify the thermal boundary conditions for the zigzag-channel PCHE. The temperature and heat flux distributions along the fluid flow direction in the heat exchanger for each segment were obtained. It was observed that the temperatures were not constant along the azimuthal direction of a cross section of the flow channel and the helium temperature distribution for each segment presented a wavy shape. However, the global helium temperature distribution along the entire flow channel was approximately linear. For the heat flux distributions, although they were significantly different at different segments, the trend for the heat flux for each segment along the fluid flow direction was similar.
