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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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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Latest News
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.
Michael Martin Nieto, A. C. Hayes, William B. Wilson, Corinne M. Teeter, William D. Stanbro
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 149 | Number 3 | March 2005 | Pages 270-276
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE05-A2493
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The feasibility of using the detection of electron antineutrinos produced in fission to monitor the time dependence of the plutonium content of nuclear power reactors is discussed. If practical, such a scheme would allow worldwide, automated monitoring of reactors and, thereby, the detection of certain proliferation scenarios. For GW(electric) power reactors, the count rates and the sensitivity of the antineutrino spectrum (to the core burnup) suggest that monitoring of the gross operational status of the reactor from outside the containment vessel is feasible. As the plutonium content builds up in a given burn cycle, the total number of antineutrinos steadily drops; and this variation is quite detectable, assuming fixed reactor power. The average antineutrino energy also steadily drops, and a measurement of this variation would be very useful to help offset uncertainties in the total reactor power. However, the expected change in the antineutrino signal from the diversion of a significant quantity of plutonium, which would typically require the diversion of as little as a single fuel assembly in a GW(electric) reactor, would be very difficult to detect.