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Human Factors, Instrumentation & Controls
Improving task performance, system reliability, system and personnel safety, efficiency, and effectiveness are the division's main objectives. Its major areas of interest include task design, procedures, training, instrument and control layout and placement, stress control, anthropometrics, psychological input, and motivation.
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International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
M. Z. Youssef, M. E. Sawan
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 4 | May 2005 | Pages 1038-1045
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - First Wall, Blanket, and Shield | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A824
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Neutronics testing is among the several types of fusion technology testing scheduled to be performed in ITER. The three ports assigned for testing will test several blanket concepts proposed by the various parties with test blanket modules (TBM) that utilize different breeders and coolants. Nevertheless, neutronics issues to be resolved in ITER-TBM are generic in nature and are important to each TBM type. Dedicated neutronics tests specifically address the accuracy involved in predicting key neutronics parameters such as tritium production rate, TPR, volumetric heating rate, induced activation and decay heat, and radiation damage to the reactor components. In this paper, we address some strategies for performing the neutronics tests. Tritium self-sufficiency cannot be confirmed by testing in ITER, however, the testing can provide valuable information regarding the main parameters needed to assess the feasibility of achieving tritium self-sufficiency. The paper also addresses the operational requirement (i.e. flux and fluence) as well as the geometrical requirement of the test module (i.e. minimum size) in order to have meaningful and useful tests. Measured neutronics data require high spatial resolution. This necessitates that the measured quantity be as flat as possible in the innermost locations inside the test module. This requirement has been confirmed in the present work based on results from two-dimensional calculations. The US and Japan solid breeder test blanket modules are placed inside half a port in ITER. The R- model used accounts for the presence of the ITER shielding blanket and the surrounding frame of the port.