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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.
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2025 ANS Annual Conference
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Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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High-temperature plumbing and advanced reactors
The use of nuclear fission power and its role in impacting climate change is hotly debated. Fission advocates argue that short-term solutions would involve the rapid deployment of Gen III+ nuclear reactors, like Vogtle-3 and -4, while long-term climate change impact would rely on the creation and implementation of Gen IV reactors, “inherently safe” reactors that use passive laws of physics and chemistry rather than active controls such as valves and pumps to operate safely. While Gen IV reactors vary in many ways, one thing unites nearly all of them: the use of exotic, high-temperature coolants. These fluids, like molten salts and liquid metals, can enable reactor engineers to design much safer nuclear reactors—ultimately because the boiling point of each fluid is extremely high. Fluids that remain liquid over large temperature ranges can provide good heat transfer through many demanding conditions, all with minimal pressurization. Although the most apparent use for these fluids is advanced fission power, they have the potential to be applied to other power generation sources such as fusion, thermal storage, solar, or high-temperature process heat.1–3
Shuangbao Shu, Ziqiao Yu, Jiaxin Zhang, Zhiqiang Chen, Huajun Liang, Jingjing Chen
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 4 | April 2023 | Pages 589-600
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2132101
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Baseline drift and noise can blur or even drown out a signal and affect analysis results, especially in multivariate analysis. To address the problem of spectrum denoising and baseline correction, this paper proposes an improved dual asymmetric penalized least squares (IDAPLS) baseline correction method. The proposed method first changes the single parameter λ used for balancing fidelity and roughness in the traditional penalty least squares (PLS) method into a new diagonal matrix Λ and uses the fast convergent inverse tangent S-type penalty function to iteratively estimate the noise level. Then, the diagonal matrix Ψ is introduced into the fidelity of the updated energy spectrum, and the element ψi is updated iteratively by using the inverse tangent S-type penalty function. Finally, the baseline of the original signal is obtained when a preset number of iterations or termination criteria are reached. Compared with other methods, IDAPLS solves the problem of underfitted curves when dealing with additive noise that the asymmetric least squares method and adaptive iterative reweighted penalized least squares method would get. The proposed method also retains the advantage of fast PLS and realizes the further approximation of the fitting baseline to the real baseline. Especially, in the case of high noise, this method reduces the error of the traditional PLS method from 30% to less than 5%, which gives a useful reference for nuclear data analysis.