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Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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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
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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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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. R. Baer, S. K. Griffiths, J. E. Shepherd
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 88 | Number 3 | November 1984 | Pages 436-444
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE84-A18597
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Water fogs are recognized as an effective means to mitigate the effects of large-scale hydrogen combustion that might accompany some loss-of-coolant nuclear reactor accidents. Fogs of sufficiently high density to produce large beneficial effects may, however, be difficult to generate and maintain. An alternate method of suspending the desired mass of water is via high expansion-ratio aqueous foams. Because, in practice, the foam would be generated using the combustible gaseous contents of the containment vessel, combustion occurs inside the foam cells. Although foams generated with inert gas have been well studied for use in fire fighting, little is known about combustion in foams generated with flammable mixtures. To help assess the usefulness of aqueous foams in a mitigation plan, several open-tube tests and more than 100 closed-vessel tests of hydrogen/air combustion, with and without foam were conducted. At low and intermediate hydrogen concentrations, the foam has little effect on the ultimate isochoric pressure rise. Above 15% hydrogen concentration, the foam causes a significant reduction in the pressure rise. The maximum effect occurs at ∼28% hydrogen (the stoichiometric limit is 29.6% hydrogen) where the peak overpressure is reduced by 2½. Despite this overall pressure reduction, the flame speed is increased by up to an order of magnitude for combustion in the foam, and strong pressure fluctuations are observed near a hydrogen concentration of 23%.