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Division Spotlight
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.
Meeting Spotlight
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
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
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.
Massimiliano Fratoni, Ehud Greenspan
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 166 | Number 1 | September 2010 | Pages 1-16
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE09-66
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The capability to perform depletion analysis of pebble bed reactors has been traditionally limited to a few dedicated codes that are designed for helium-cooled reactors, rely on pregenerated problem-dependent group cross sections, and have limited flexibility in the materials and in the geometries they can model. This paper presents a newly developed tool to search for pebble bed reactor core equilibrium composition and calculate its neutronic characteristics. It uses MCNP for transport calculations and ORIGEN2 for depletion calculations and can generate effective one-group cross sections “on-the-fly” as pebbles move through the core using point-energy cross sections. This tool can be used for any coolant type including liquid salt, can model complex geometries, and can account for any level of heterogeneity. Also developed are two simplified methodologies that are based on unit-cell analysis and can considerably reduce the required computational time; they are useful for parametric studies.