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Division Spotlight
Materials Science & Technology
The objectives of MSTD are: promote the advancement of materials science in Nuclear Science Technology; support the multidisciplines which constitute it; encourage research by providing a forum for the presentation, exchange, and documentation of relevant information; promote the interaction and communication among its members; and recognize and reward its members for significant contributions to the field of materials science in nuclear technology.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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
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.
Priscila Palma Sanchez, Adimir dos Santos
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 195 | Number 5 | May 2021 | Pages 555-562
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1854541
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In order to ensure safety in a nuclear power plant, operation and protection systems must take into account safety parameters, whether to guide operators or to trip the reactor in emergency cases. Especially in a boron-free small modular reactor (SMR) where reactivity and power are controlled exclusively by rod banks, the power distribution is mostly influenced by its movements affecting the power peaking factor (PPF), which is an important parameter to be considered. The PPF relates the maximum local linear power density to the average power density in a fuel rod indicating a high neutron flux that can cause fuel rod damage. In this technical note, 2117 samples from simulations of an idealized boron-free SMR controlled exclusively by rod banks were used to generate a Support Vector Machine (SVM) model capable of estimating the PPF as a function of control rod bank positions. Such model could be used to predict the maximum PPF in the reactor core by carrying out simple calculation. Residing in a SVM parameter grid search and a 10-cross-validation process in the training set to reach an optimized and robust model, the results have shown a root-mean-squared error of about 0.1% consistent for both training and testing sets.