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April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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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.
T. Trombetti, D. L. Hetrick
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 86 | Number 2 | February 1984 | Pages 129-135
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE84-A18195
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A multinode treatment of the problem of nonlinear reactor stability is given. The nodal kinetics equations account for nodal powers, precursor concentrations, and temperatures. Nonlinear power-plus-temperature feedbacks are admitted in each node. Quadratic and logarithmic Lyapunov functions are considered. By formulating and solving a suitable nonlinear programming problem, the optimal estimate of the domain of attraction of the reactor-operating equilibrium state that can be afforded by the aforesaid V functions is explicitly constructed. An example of a reactor with two nodal power feedbacks (one destabilizing) and two destabilizing nodal temperature feedbacks is given. These feedbacks are seen to give rise to an unstable equilibrium reactor state, in the region of all-positive perturbations, which is extremely well approached by the boundary of the estimate of the domain of attraction.