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Conference Spotlight
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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A new ANSI/ANS standard for liquid metal fire protection published
ANSI/ANS-54.8-2025, Liquid Metal Fire Protection in LMR Plants, received approval from the American National Standards Institute on September 2 and is now available for purchase.
The 2025 edition is a reinvigoration of the withdrawn ANS-54.8-1988 of the same title. The Advanced Reactor Codes and Standards Collaborative (ARCSC) identified the need for a current version of the standard via an industry survey.
Typical liquid metal reactor designs use liquid sodium as the coolant for both the primary and intermediate heat-transport systems. In addition, liquid sodium and NaK (a mixture of sodium and potassium that is liquid at room temperature) are often used in auxiliary heat-removal systems. Since these liquid metals can react readily with oxygen, water, and other compounds, special precautions must be taken in the design, construction, testing, and maintenance of the sodium/NaK systems to ensure that the potential for leakage is very small.
HENRI B. SMETS
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 11 | Number 4 | December 1961 | Pages 428-433
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE61-A26044
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The stability and instability properties of homogeneous nuclear reactors with a single temperature coefficient of reactivity which is temperature dependent are studied by means of Liapounoff's Second Method. The special case of a temperature coefficient linearly dependent on temperature is solved completely for a space-independent model and it is shown that all solutions are bounded and tend asymptotically to a constant if the reactivity decreases as the temperature approaches large values. In some conditions, the reactor has two stable equilibrium points (bistable).