ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 15–18, 2026
Phoenix, AZ|Arizona Grand Resort & Spa
Latest Magazine Issues
Aug 2026
Jan 2026
2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
October 2026
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
August 2026
Latest News
Fuel loading process begins at Palisades
The Palisades nuclear power plant has drawn closer to restart, as plant staff began the process of loading fuel into the reactor vessel on Sunday morning.
The commencement of fuel loading places the Covert, Mich., facility in Mode 6—or the refueling stage—under the plant’s technical specifications, plant owner and operator Holtec International said in a news release. The Palisades reactor core consists of 204 fuel assemblies that include new fuel and partially used fuel from the plant’s most recent operating cycles. According to Holtec, the fuel loading is being conducted in accordance with plant procedures and technical specifications.
Cheol Ho Pyeon, Masao Yamanaka, Tomohiro Endo, Go Chiba, Willem F. G Van Rooijen, Kenichi Watanabe
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 194 | Number 12 | December 2020 | Pages 1116-1127
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1774230
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
At the Kyoto University Critical Assembly experiments on kinetics parameters are carried out at near-critical configurations, supercritical and subcritical states, in the thermal neutron spectrum made with a highly enriched uranium fuel. The main calculated kinetics parameters, the effective delayed neutron fraction (βeff) and the neutron generation time (Ʌ), are used effectively for the estimation of experimental parameters, and the accuracy of experiments on prompt neutron decay constant (α) and subcriticality (ρ$) in dollar units is attained by the numerical results of βeff and Ʌ. Furthermore, the value of βeff/Ʌ is experimentally deduced with the use of the experimental results of α and ρ$, ranging between 250 and −80 pcm. Thus, the experimentally deduced values of βeff/Ʌ that reveal good accuracy through a comparison with those by the MCNP6.1 calculations with JENDL-4.0 are then taken as an index of Ʌ by introducing an acceptable assumption of βeff at near-critical configurations. From the results of experimental and numerical analyses, the experimental value of βeff/Ʌ is important for the validation of Ʌ since kinetics parameters are successfully obtained from the clean cores of near-critical configurations in the thermal neutron spectrum.