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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.
Meeting Spotlight
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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Latest News
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.
H. Guo, G. Martin, L. Buiron (CEA)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 1231-1240
CEA is largely involved in the study of GEN-IV Sodium Fast Reactors (SFR). Some innovative reactivity control systems are proposed such as utilization of different absorbers or moderators materials, modification of absorber pin geometry, and application of burnable neutron poison. These designs possess potentials to improve its safety margin, economical performance or core characteristics while its complete analysis requires notably more accurate calculation of efficiency and evolution of isotopes’ concentrations under irradiation.
At the same time, the new determinist transport code APOLLO3® is under development at CEA and it will replace ERANOS code for fast reactors analysis. The scheme in APOLLO3® is constituted with two steps: sub-assembly calculation and core calculation with Multi-Parametric Output Library as connectors which enable the interpolation of cross-sections according to specific parameter. In this paper, each step and different cross-section scheme are detailed and validated by continuous energy Monte Carlo calculations. These results are also compared with determinist code system ERANOS.
Our works show high adaptability of TDT solver in APOLLO3® to complexes geometries and evolution of isotopes. With the ability of MINARET to treat unstructured mesh, the heterogeneous geometry, keeping absorber pins at core level calculation, improves significantly the calculation of control rods’ efficiency. APOLLO3® compute more accurately core’s reactivity variation with burn-up tabulated cross section scheme. Although variation of spatial self-shielding effect is very significant in absorber depletion, tabulated cross-sections scheme is able to bring this variation from sub-assembly calculation to core calculation. Hence, even homogeneous control rod description at core level shows accurate computation of reactivity variation.
Consequently, with development and validations, APOLLO3® shows improvement on SFR control rods neutronic simulation and analysis. With these new schemes presented in this paper, innovative reactivity control systems designs will be completely characterized and investigated in the near future.
