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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.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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.
Silva Kalcheva, Edgar Koonen, Bernard Ponsard
Nuclear Technology | Volume 151 | Number 2 | August 2005 | Pages 201-219
Technical Paper | Advances in Nuclear Fuel Management - Fuel Management of Reactors Other Than Light Water Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT05-A3644
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Belgian Material Test Reactor BR2 is a strongly heterogeneous high-flux engineering test reactor at SCK-CEN (Centre d'Etude de l'Energie Nucléaire) in Mol with a thermal power of 60 to 100 MW. It deploys highly enriched uranium, water-cooled concentric plate fuel elements, positioned inside a beryllium reflector with a complex hyperboloid arrangement of test holes. The objective of this paper is to validate the MCNP&ORIGEN-S three-dimensional (3-D) model for reactivity predictions of the entire BR2 core during reactor operation. We employ the Monte Carlo code MCNP-4C to evaluate the effective multiplication factor keff and 3-D space-dependent specific power distribution. The one-dimensional code ORIGEN-S is used to calculate the isotopic fuel depletion versus burnup and to prepare a database with depleted fuel compositions. The approach taken is to evaluate the 3-D power distribution at each time step and along with the database to evaluate the 3-D isotopic fuel depletion at the next step and to deduce the corresponding shim rod positions of the reactor operation. The capabilities of both codes are fully exploited without constraints on the number of involved isotope depletion chains or an increase of the computational time. The reactor has a complex operation, with important shutdowns between cycles, and its reactivity is strongly influenced by poisons, mainly 3He and 6Li from the beryllium reflector, and the burnable absorbers 149Sm and 10B in the fresh UAlx fuel. The computational predictions for the shim rod positions at various restarts are within 0.5 $ (eff = 0.0072).