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Division Spotlight
Robotics & Remote Systems
The Mission of the Robotics and Remote Systems Division is to promote the development and application of immersive simulation, robotics, and remote systems for hazardous environments for the purpose of reducing hazardous exposure to individuals, reducing environmental hazards and reducing the cost of performing work.
Meeting Spotlight
Nuclear and Emerging Technologies for Space (NETS 2025)
May 4–8, 2025
Huntsville, AL|Huntsville Marriott and the Space & Rocket Center
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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Latest News
First concrete marks start of safety-related construction for Hermes test reactor
Kairos Power announced this morning that safety-related nuclear construction has begun at the Oak Ridge, Tenn., site where the company is building its Hermes low-power test reactor. Hermes, a scaled demonstration of Kairos Power’s fluoride salt–cooled, high-temperature reactor technology, became the first non–light water reactor to receive a construction permit from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in December 2023. The company broke ground at the site in July 2024.
Dmitri Ziabletsev, Maria Avramova, Kostadin Ivanov
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 148 | Number 3 | November 2004 | Pages 414-425
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE04-A2467
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The subchannel code COBRA-TF has been introduced for an evaluation of thermal margins on the local pin-by-pin level in a pressurized water reactor. The coupling of COBRA-TF with TRAC-PF1/NEM is performed by providing from TRAC to COBRA-TF axial and radial thermal-hydraulic boundary conditions and relative pin-power profiles, obtained with the pin power reconstruction model of the nodal expansion method (NEM). An efficient algorithm for coupling of the subchannel code COBRA-TF with TRAC-PF1/NEM in the parallel virtual machine environment was developed addressing the issues of time synchronization, data exchange, spatial overlays, and coupled convergence. Local feedback modeling on the pin level was implemented into COBRA-TF, which enabled updating the local form functions and the recalculation of the pin powers in TRAC-PF1/NEM after obtaining the local feedback parameters. The coupled TRAC-PF1/NEM/COBRA-TF code system was tested on the rod ejection accident and main steam line break benchmark problems. In both problems, the local results are closer than before the introduced multilevel coupling to the corresponding critical limits. This fact indicates that the assembly average results tend to underestimate the accident consequences in terms of local safety margins. The capability of local safety evaluation, performed simultaneously (online) with coupled global three-dimensional neutron kinetics/thermal-hydraulic calculations, is introduced and tested. The obtained results demonstrate the importance of the current work.