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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Risk-informed, performance-based design in INL’s MARVEL reactor
The American Nuclear Society’s Risk-informed, Performance-based Principles and Policy Committee (RP3C) has held another presentation in its monthly Community of Practice (CoP) series. Former RP3C chair N. Prasad Kadambi opened the meeting with brief introductory remarks about the RP3C and the need for new approaches to nuclear design that go beyond conventional and deterministic methods. He then welcomed this month’s speaker: Doug Gerstner, a nuclear safety engineer at Idaho National Laboratory, who presented “Application of a Qualitative RIPB Approach for the MARVEL Microreactor at INL.”
Watch the full webinar here.
Yoshiro Asahi, Keisuke Okumura, Yasuo Ose
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 139 | Number 1 | September 2001 | Pages 78-95
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE01-A2223
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The rate equation for neutronic population is derived from the transient neutron diffusion equation. Neutronic imbalance is defined as the difference between the solution of the rate equation and the neutronic population obtained by spatial kinetics. If the transient neutron diffusion equation in the fully implicit formulation is discretized in such a manner as to satisfy the Gauss theorem and to retain a conservation form, neutronic imbalance decreases as the convergence criteria become strict. The iterative implicit method for neutronics and thermal hydraulics requires continuity of all the variables involved, which, in turn, facilitates the automatic time-step width control. From the viewpoints not only of well-posedness of a transient problem but also of code verification, a transient code should be capable of a null transient analysis for stable systems. Sample calculations are performed for a pressurized water reactor main-steam-line-break accident. An overall thermal-hydraulic trend model is conjectured to help compare and explain the calculated results. Spatial kinetics is found to clearly influence even the temporal behaviors of the secondary system.