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Division Spotlight
Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
Meeting Spotlight
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
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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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.
P. Köhler, J. Ligou
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 54 | Number 3 | July 1974 | Pages 357-360
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE74-A23426
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Calculations of neutron streaming in gas-cooled fast reactors (GCFR) designed with fuel pins have not been made properly up to now. The usual approach for computing the diffusion coefficients fails for two reasons: (a) the voided region is located at the cell boundary, and (b) the pitch is such that two-dimensional infinite gaps extend through the reactor. For an infinite lattice, the diffusion coefficient will diverge, which means that, in principle, the diffusion theory is no longer valid. This fact has been more or less forgotten because most theories assume cylindrical cells and therefore remove this difficulty artificially. Introducing the real size of the reactor at the beginning, a new theory of the streaming, which generalizes the usual approach is developed; it appears as a buckling dependent term in the diffusion coefficient which diverges slowly for an infinite lattice. Fortunately, this term is small for usual reactor sizes, and one may, therefore, continue to use diffusion theory for practical calculations. The numerical applications to GCFR lattices show that the streaming was underestimated in the past.