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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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Powering the future: How the DOE is fueling nuclear fuel cycle research and development
As global interest in nuclear energy surges, the United States must remain at the forefront of research and development to ensure national energy security, advance nuclear technologies, and promote international cooperation on safety and nonproliferation. A crucial step in achieving this is analyzing how funding and resources are allocated to better understand how to direct future research and development. The Department of Energy has spearheaded this effort by funding hundreds of research projects across the country through the Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP). This initiative has empowered dozens of universities to collaborate toward a nuclear-friendly future.
Anton Lüthi, Rakesh Chawla, Gérald Rimpault
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 138 | Number 3 | July 2001 | Pages 233-255
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE01-A2211
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new calculational scheme has been developed for the accurate assessment of gamma heating in fast reactors, its special feature being the determination of the gamma source distribution that is formulated in a near-to-exact manner. The improved methodology, which has been implemented into the ERANOS (European Reactor Analysis Optimized System) code package, is currently validated for Pu-burning configurations, for which gamma-heating target accuracies are particularly high. This has been accomplished through comparisons with new integral measurements conducted at the MASURCA facility, as well as with reevaluated earlier experiments. In the new measurements, absolute gamma-heating rates were determined in PuO2/UO2-fueled cores surrounded by a steel/sodium reflector, mainly using TLD-700 thermoluminescent dosimeters. Thereby, a considerable effort was undertaken to minimize systematic errors. The calculation/experiment values determined from the analysis of the critical experiments are 0.90 for the PuO2/UO2 core region, 0.84 for the steel/sodium reflector, and 0.89 for an internal steel/sodium diluent zone. The most plausible causes for the observed discrepancies have been identified to be data related, i.e., too low fission gamma energies and too low capture cross sections for the structural elements. The transferability of the current validation findings to a modified Superphénix configuration, in which the radial fertile blanket is replaced by a steel/sodium reflector, and to the 1500 MW(electric) Pu-burning CAPRA 4/94 reference design has been demonstrated.
