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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
Sam Altman steps down as Oklo board chair
Advanced nuclear company Oklo Inc. has new leadership for its board of directors as billionaire Sam Altman is stepping down from the position he has held since 2015. The move is meant to open new partnership opportunities with OpenAI, where Altman is CEO, and other artificial intelligence companies.
Kodai Fukuda, Jun Nishiyama, Toru Obara
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 195 | Number 5 | May 2021 | Pages 453-463
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1847979
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To proceed with the decommissioning of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, analyses of unexpected fuel debris criticality accidents are needed. Supercritical transient analyses have been conducted for fuel debris using the Multiregion Integral Kinetic (MIK) code, which can take the space dependence of fuel debris into account. In those analyses, reactivity is assumed as stepwise insertion because the MIK code does not include delayed neutron effects, which might be negligible. However, reactivity insertion may not always be stepwise. Therefore, it is important to clarify an applicable range of the MIK code for nonstepwise insertion, such as ramp reactivity insertion. To show that kinetics codes without delayed neutron effects could be applied for a supercritical transient induced by ramp reactivity insertion, we established a method to clarify its applicable range. An analysis using the point reactor kinetics model was introduced as a pre-analysis to clarify this range in the case of ramp reactivity insertion in terms of the contribution of delayed neutrons. We applied the methodology to a simple cylindrical fuel debris system and successfully demonstrated a supercritical transient analysis for ramp reactivity insertion using the MIK code.