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Fusion Energy
This division promotes the development and timely introduction of fusion energy as a sustainable energy source with favorable economic, environmental, and safety attributes. The division cooperates with other organizations on common issues of multidisciplinary fusion science and technology, conducts professional meetings, and disseminates technical information in support of these goals. Members focus on the assessment and resolution of critical developmental issues for practical fusion energy applications.
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.
Weixiong Zheng, Ryan G. McClarren
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 183 | Number 1 | May 2016 | Pages 78-95
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE15-48
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We investigate the calibration of the uncertainties of thermal scattering of ZrHx in the fuel material in TRIGA reactor simulations. Thermal scattering cross sections of ZrHx are heavily affected by the solid-state frequency distributions, also called phonon spectra. In previous work, we proposed parameterized phonon spectrum models and explored the effects on quantities of interest (QoIs) of changing spectra with such models by varying the parameters. In this work, we establish a more general calibration framework for the phonon spectrum of ZrHx. To accomplish this calibration, we introduce two emulators, Gaussian process regression and Bayesian multivariate adaptive regression splines, to create a map from the input parameters to the QoIs into the calibration framework. Using these emulators, we perform calibrations using the emulation results with the same QoIs at 600 K. Test simulations using data generated with calibrated parameters show that uncertainties of the QoIs shrink over 50%. Moreover, we extend the test to the reactivity at a different temperature, 293.6 K, as an extrapolated test of the calibration, and obtained results close to those of the surrogate experiment. The efficacy and efficiency of implementing emulators in the calibration framework are demonstrated.