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Fusion Energy
This division promotes the development and timely introduction of fusion energy as a sustainable energy source with favorable economic, environmental, and safety attributes. The division cooperates with other organizations on common issues of multidisciplinary fusion science and technology, conducts professional meetings, and disseminates technical information in support of these goals. Members focus on the assessment and resolution of critical developmental issues for practical fusion energy applications.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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
G7 pledges support for nuclear at Italy meeting
The Group of Seven (G7) recommitted its support for nuclear energy in the countries that opt to use it at a Ministerial Meeting on Climate in Italy last month.
In a statement following the April meeting, the group committed to support multilateral efforts to strengthen the resilience of nuclear supply chains, referencing the goal set by 25 countries during last year’s COP28 climate conference in Dubai to triple global nuclear generating capacity by 2050.
Yuxuan Liu, Kyle Vaughn, Brendan Kochunas, Thomas Downar
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 195 | Number 1 | January 2021 | Pages 50-68
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1780853
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Over the years, significant validation work for the neutronics code MPACT has been performed against zero-power critical benchmarks and measured data from operating nuclear power plants. Among all of these efforts, however, validation of the pin-resolved capability in MPACT has been limited by the public availability of experimental data and to a lesser degree availability of measurement techniques and facilities that provide such detailed data. Recently, new measurement results to experimentally determine the reaction rate along the pellet radius from the IPEN/MB-01 research reactor facility (IPEN) have been published as a benchmark in the International Reactor Physics Experiment Project handbook. In this paper, we examine MPACT simulation results for several IPEN benchmark experiments with emphasis on the intrapin reaction rate measurements. The IPEN critical experiments with variations in system temperature and gadolinium loadings are modeled first with the latest MPACT cross-section library and linear source (LS) method of characteristics (MOC) capability. The MPACT results of two-dimensional (2-D) models with axial buckling are within 160 pcm from the experimental eigenvalues using the flat source MOC. Using the LS MOC, the errors are no more than 70 pcm, and the temperature trend of various cases is smaller. The MPACT three-dimensional models with LS show slightly worse comparisons than the 2-D models, which may be due to the isotropic transverse leakage and homogenized cross-section approximations of the 2-D/one-dimensional solver. For the reaction rate validation, MPACT produces intrapin reaction rate results within 2σ of the experiment and shows excellent agreement with the Monte Carlo solution. The observed discrepancies between the simulated results and experiment for the fission rate measurements are discussed. The kinetics parameters measured in another IPEN experiment are also compared with MPACT simulations using different kinetics data sources. According to the validation results, JENDL-4.0 and Santamarina et al.’s data are recommended for MPACT transient calculations.