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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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.
Elham Gharibshahi, Miltos Alamaniotis
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 196 | Number 8 | August 2022 | Pages 1006-1019
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2035182
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this paper, the optical properties of lead-thorium (Pb-Th), lead-uranium (Pb-U), and lead-cobalt (Pb-Co) nuclear nanoparticles in a container filled with water are simulated and modeled employing finite element analysis (FEA) for diverse particle sizes. The simulated absorption maxima of electronic excitations of nuclear nanoparticles such as Pb-U are red-shifted from 375 to 380 nm for the first peak, from 595 to 600 nm for the second peak, and from 730 to 740 nm for the third peak with increasing particle sizes from core U: 7 nm and shell Pb: 2 nm to core U: 9 nm and shell Pb: 2 nm. Moreover, the absorption peak of the Pb-Th and Pb-Co nanoparticles is red-shifted by increasing the particle size. The FEA-simulated optical band gap energies of Pb-Th, Pb-U, and Pb-Co nanoparticles were also obtained, and the data decreased with increasing the particle size. FEA-based simulations have disclosed restrictions intended for Pb-Th and Pb-Co nanoparticles size greater than 9 nm and for Pb-U nanoparticles size larger than 11 nm. The simulation method in this research enables the prediction of optical properties and contributes to the understanding and design of Pb-Th, Pb-U, and Pb-Co nanoparticles in the water container before manufacturing and functionalizing them. The work here is of particular interest in the nuclear security domain and in the nondestructive, remote detection of special nuclear materials (SNM) in water-filled cargo containers, whose manual inspection imposes physical and financial challenges.