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Division Spotlight
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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
Proving DRACO will deliver
The United States is now closer than it has been in over five decades to launching the first nuclear thermal rocket into space, thanks to DRACO—the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Orbit.
Priscila Palma Sanchez, Adimir dos Santos
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 195 | Number 5 | May 2021 | Pages 555-562
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1854541
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In order to ensure safety in a nuclear power plant, operation and protection systems must take into account safety parameters, whether to guide operators or to trip the reactor in emergency cases. Especially in a boron-free small modular reactor (SMR) where reactivity and power are controlled exclusively by rod banks, the power distribution is mostly influenced by its movements affecting the power peaking factor (PPF), which is an important parameter to be considered. The PPF relates the maximum local linear power density to the average power density in a fuel rod indicating a high neutron flux that can cause fuel rod damage. In this technical note, 2117 samples from simulations of an idealized boron-free SMR controlled exclusively by rod banks were used to generate a Support Vector Machine (SVM) model capable of estimating the PPF as a function of control rod bank positions. Such model could be used to predict the maximum PPF in the reactor core by carrying out simple calculation. Residing in a SVM parameter grid search and a 10-cross-validation process in the training set to reach an optimized and robust model, the results have shown a root-mean-squared error of about 0.1% consistent for both training and testing sets.