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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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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ANS joins others in seeking to discuss SNF/HLW impasse
The American Nuclear Society joined seven other organizations to send a letter to Energy Secretary Christopher Wright on July 8, asking to meet with him to discuss “the restoration of a highly functioning program to meet DOE’s legal responsibility to manage and dispose of the nation’s commercial and legacy defense spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and high-level radioactive waste (HLW).”
Wang Kai, Xiaowei Jiao, Chuangxiong Cai, Zhaozhong He, Kun Chen (CAS)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 1199-1204
Direct auxiliary cooling system (DRACS) is one candidate for FHR (Fluoride-salt-cooled High temperature reactor) decay heat removal system. DRACS relies on buoyancy as the driving force to form natural circulation to remove the decay heat. As a passive engineered safety feature, some key parameters and models must be validated. In order to study the characteristics of the natural circulation of the molten salts, a high-temperature molten salt natural circulation experiment loop has been designed and constructed by the TMSR (Thorium Molten Salt Reactor) center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) with nitrate selected to be coolant. A series of experiments have been scheduled to be conducted on the loop, this loop could be used as a validation facility for DRACS. In this paper, steady-state natural circulation experiment results are shown. The results show that NNCL (nitrate natural circulation loop) was running steady and reliable, and the heat can be removed continuously. The RELAP5-MS code is employed to simulate NNCL behavior, and the simulation results coincide with experiment results. The modified RELAP5-MS can be used for the molten salt natural circulation system analysis. Based on these experiments and simulation results, the DRACS system can be used in the molten salt reactor as the decay heat removal system.