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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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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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.
R. van Geemert, F. Jatuff, F. Tani, R. Chawla
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 148 | Number 1 | September 2004 | Pages 162-171
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE04-A2448
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
With reactivity being the most important integral reactor physics quantity - and simultaneously the one that can be measured with the highest accuracy - there is a great interest in understanding how possible space- and energy-dependent data and/or modeling discrepancies may propagate into a calculated reactivity change, and with which magnitude this occurs. In the context of pin removal reactivity effects in a light water reactor assembly, for example, it is illustrative to carry out, for any arbitrary localized material composition perturbation, a decomposition of the total effect into individual space- and energy-dependent contributions of the different unit cells in the assembly. If this decomposition is normalized to +100% in the case of a positive reactivity effect and to -100% in the case of a negative reactivity effect, an importance map is established that indicates the relative contribution (in percent) of each individual contributing cell to the total reactivity effect caused by the localized material composition change. Such an importance map can be interpreted as a sensitivity matrix that quantifies the final discrepancy in a calculated reactivity effect, with respect to its reference value, as a weighted sum of the complete collection of cell-wise data and/or modeling discrepancies. The current paper outlines the basic theory and gives certain practical applications of the proposed decomposition methodology. Thus, it is found that the developed methodology offers in-depth, quantitative explanations for calculational discrepancies observed in the analysis of fuel pin removal experiments conducted in the framework of the LWR-PROTEUS program at the Paul Scherrer Institute.