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Nuclear Criticality Safety
NCSD provides communication among nuclear criticality safety professionals through the development of standards, the evolution of training methods and materials, the presentation of technical data and procedures, and the creation of specialty publications. In these ways, the division furthers the exchange of technical information on nuclear criticality safety with the ultimate goal of promoting the safe handling of fissionable materials outside reactors.
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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
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.
M. A. Jessee, P. J. Turinsky, H. S. Abdel-Khalik
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 169 | Number 1 | September 2011 | Pages 40-55
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE09-67
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Computational capability has been developed to adjust multigroup neutron cross sections, including self-shielding correction factors, to improve the fidelity of boiling water reactor (BWR) core modeling and simulation. The method involves propagating multigroup neutron cross-section uncertainties through various BWR computational models to evaluate uncertainties in key core attributes such as core keff, nodal power distributions, thermal margins, and in-core detector readings. Uncertainty-based inverse theory methods are then employed to adjust multigroup cross sections to minimize the disagreement between BWR core modeling predictions and observed (i.e., measured) plant data. For this paper, observed plant data are virtually simulated in the form of perturbed three-dimensional nodal power distributions with the perturbations sized to represent actual discrepancies between predictions and real plant data. The major focus of this work is to efficiently propagate multigroup neutron cross-section uncertainty through BWR lattice physics and core simulator calculations. The data adjustment equations are developed using a subspace approach that exploits the ill-conditioning of the multigroup cross-section covariance matrix to minimize computation and storage burden. Tikhonov regularization is also employed to improve the conditioning of the data adjustment equations. Expressions are also provided for posterior covariance matrices of both the multigroup cross-section and core attributes uncertainties.