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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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Joint NEA project performs high-burnup test
An article in the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency’s July news bulletin noted that a first test has been completed for the High Burnup Experiments in Reactivity Initiated Accident (HERA) project. The project aim is to understand the performance of light water reactor fuel at high burnup under reactivity-initiated accidents (RIA).
Technical Session|Panel|Sponsored by RPD
Tuesday, November 15, 2022|1:00–2:45PM MST|Sonoran 7
Session Chair:
Samuel E. Bays
Session Organizer:
Alternate Chair:
Massimiliano Fratoni
The Reactor Physics Division is hosting a panel discussion of the need for and development of a standard to address the initial fuel loading and startup testing of a demonstration first-of-a-kind reactor. Members of this expert panel will include program leaders from actual past reactors. The panel will include commercial reactor physics software developers with NQA-1 software quality experience. The panel will also include regulatory authority on advanced reactor licensing. Modeling software being used to design advanced reactors (fission batter, micro-, SMRs) today is typically validated using pre-existing peer reviewed integral benchmarks. Although benchmarking activities are very rigorous, the propagated uncertainties for as-built reactor systems can still be quite large. Additionally, the advanced reactor systems being considered today frequently have significant differences when compared with the historical reactor systems for which benchmarks are founded. Physics testing during reactor startup is the final opportunity for characterizing data uncertainty before hot full power operation. Therefore, a best practices standard is needed to provide guidance on how to leverage traditional startup procedures with software validation methods.
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