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Division Spotlight
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
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.
P. B. Abramson, H. H. Hummel, E. M. Gelbard, P. A. Pizzica, J. J. Sienicki
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 66 | Number 1 | April 1978 | Pages 14-23
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE78-A15184
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the use of large computers to analyze severe accidents in liquid-metal fast breeder reactors (LMFBRs), it has long been recognized that many of the fundamental phenomena cannot be precisely predicted because of uncertainty in the parameters that govern them. As a direct result, mechanistic analysis of such accidents has proceeded along a parametric path in which these variables are fixed at a certain constant value for the entire calculation: The influence of variation of this value is assessed by making a series of complete calculations with the parameter set at a different value for each such element of the series. While some parameters may be thought of as “correlated” or fixed for an entire calculation, very few are in fact constant throughout a reactor, and many are (for practical purposes) nearly completely uncorrected, either in space or time, during the hypothetical accident. Thus, such analysis has created a set of results that are not indicative or representative of an accident involving uncorrected or only partially correlated variable parameters. We describe here a methodology for dealing with various degrees of uncertainty or incoherence in these parameters. By using two very different mechanistic codes (FX2-POOL and EPIC), we demonstrate that the treatment of uncorrected parameters, such as droplet/particle size in a hypothetical core disruptive accident, as random variables with a certain probability distribution during each complete calculation of a series of calculations produces as much as an order of magnitude less uncertainty in the end result than had been obtained assuming perfect correlation. Finally, we categorize a small list of parameters as either correlated or uncorrected for some of the other LMFBR accident analysis codes. The technique we demonstrate can be easily implemented in a broad spectrum of accident analysis codes with similar benefits.