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Division Spotlight
Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
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.
L. Pantera, Y. Garnier, F. Jeury
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 183 | Number 2 | June 2016 | Pages 247-260
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE15-77
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The CABRI facility is an experimental nuclear reactor of the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) designed to study the behavior of fuel rods at high burnup under reactivity initiated accident conditions, such as a control rod ejection. The distinctive feature of this reactor is its reactivity injection system. The power can rise from 100 kW to 25 GW in a few milliseconds. To know the energy released into a test rod, it is necessary to access the driver core power online. The neutron flux is measured online by compensated boron chambers. These neutron detectors are calibrated during the commissioning phase thanks to standards given by a conventional heat balance. The boron chamber signal depends on the temperature of the pool and the magnitude of the core power according to a nonlinear multivariate model. The uncertainties of the standards and those of the neutron chamber signal cannot be neglected. Moreover, the size of the sample is very small due to the operational constraints. A classic regression method does not take into account all these parameters. In such a situation, we show how the statistical bootstrap method can prove to be a useful and easy tool in tackling this issue. This paper describes first the adjustment of the calibration model that will be used for the prediction during the core power transient and second how we take into account both the uncertainties of the physical variables and the small size of the experimental sample.