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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.
G. C. Pomraning
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 124 | Number 3 | November 1996 | Pages 390-397
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE96-A17918
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
If the scattering interaction in linear particle transport problems is highly peaked about zero momentum transfer, a common and often useful approximation is the replacement of the integral scattering operator with the differential Fokker-Planck operator. This operator involves a first derivative in energy and second derivatives in angle. In this paper, higher order Fokker-Planck scattering operators are derived, involving higher derivatives in both energy and angle. The applicability of these higher order differential operators to representative scattering kernels is discussed. It is shown that, depending upon the details of the scattering kernel in the integral operator, higher order Fokker-Planck approximations may or may not be valid. Even the classic low-order Fokker-Planck operator fails as an approximation for certain highly peaked scattering kernels. In particular, no Fokker-Planck operator is a valid approximation for scattering involving the widely used Henyey-Greenstein scattering kernel.