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Improving task performance, system reliability, system and personnel safety, efficiency, and effectiveness are the division's main objectives. Its major areas of interest include task design, procedures, training, instrument and control layout and placement, stress control, anthropometrics, psychological input, and motivation.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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Latest News
Framatome signs contracts with Sizewell C
French nuclear developer Framatome is slated to deliver key equipment for Sizewell C Ltd.’s two large reactors planned for the United Kingdom’s Suffolk coast.
The agreement, reportedly worth multiple billions of euros, was announced this week and will involve Framatome from the design phase until commissioning. The company also agreed to a long-term fuel supply deal. Framatome is 80.5 percent owned by France’s EDF and 19.5 percent owned by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.
Argala Srivastava, Deep Bhandari, K. P. Singh, Umasankari Kannan
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 4 | April 2023 | Pages 703-710
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2131343
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this technical note, an analysis of an integral experiment of the Advanced Heavy Water Reactor (AHWR) Critical Facility (CF) with a diffusion-based Monte Carlo (MC) method is discussed. In this method, the diffusion kernel is converted into probabilities per unit time for tracking the particle in the problem domain. The diffusion-based MC method is coupled with a time-dependent MC algorithm developed earlier and has been used for space-time simulations in neutron multiplication assemblies. Kinetics simulations are best solved using a transport MC route, but this requires long computational time. The diffusion-based MC method provides a faster solution in such space-time simulations. Most of the space-time kinetics studies and benchmarks are based on diffusion theory, and there are very few transport theory or MC benchmarks. Thus, the diffusion-based MC facilitates exact comparison with the large number of diffusion theory benchmarks. The efficacy of this method was tested earlier by comparison with the results of realistic space-time kinetics benchmarks based on diffusion theory methods involving multiregion reactors and detailed energy dependence. Comparison of our results with these benchmarks has shown satisfactory agreement.
As a step toward more detailed benchmarking, the ability and accuracy of this method are tested on the recent experiment done in the AHWR CF. The integral experiments with one thoria-based mixed oxide experimental fuel assembly in the core of the AHWR CF were analyzed with this method and were compared with the observed experimental values. The experiments consisted of measurement of the critical height and worth of shut-off rods (SORs) with the experimental fuel assembly placed at different lattice locations. Neutron count rates as a function of time after reactor trip for estimation of the worth of the SORs were also simulated, and the results are found to be in good agreement with the observed values.