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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
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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Why should safeguards by design be a global effort?
Jeremy Whitlock
I can’t think of a more exciting time to be working in nuclear, with the diversity of advanced reactor development and increasing global support for nuclear in sustainable energy planning. But we can’t lose sight of the need to plan for efficient international safeguards at the same time.
Global nuclear deployment has been underpinned since 1970 by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), making it a key customer requirement for governments to demonstrate unequivocally that the technology is not being misused for weapons development.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has helped verify this commitment for more than 50 years, but it has never safeguarded many of the advanced reactors (and related fuel cycle processes) being developed today.
Tunc Aldemir, Giancarlo Torri, Marzio Marseguerra, Enrico Zio, Jeffrey A. Borkowski
Nuclear Technology | Volume 143 | Number 3 | September 2003 | Pages 247-255
Technical Paper | Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT03-A3414
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Estimation of xenon concentration at a given time instant is usually a difficult problem since the initial conditions are often unknown as well as a number of the model parameters. The feasibility of obtaining the model parameters of a point reactor xenon evolution model with genetic algorithms (GAs) has been investigated earlier using data obtained from a point reactor model under assumed conditions. Actual operational data from The Ohio State University Research Reactor (OSURR) and simulated operational data from the Oconee plant are used to extend this earlier work. It is shown that the point reactor model, joined with an efficient GA parameter estimation procedure, can be used for accurate prediction of global xenon evolution in small reactors (e.g., OSURR). It is also shown that this approach yields just qualitatively correct results in large reactors (e.g., Oconee) where spatial effects become significant. By continuously updating the model parameters obtained by GAs, xenon induced reactivity during transients can be estimated purely from the past reactivity and power data without a knowledge of initial conditions for 135Xe and 135I.