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Senate bill looks to clarify DOE authority over advanced reactors
Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah), chair of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources (ENR), has introduced a bill that would grant the Department of Energy greater authority over new nuclear projects under the federal agency’s oversight.
Eunji Lee, N. Colby Fleming, Ayman I. Hawari
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 8 | August 2023 | Pages 2007-2016
Technical papers from: PHYSOR 2022 | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2162789
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A benchmark has been developed using a pulsed slowing-down-time experiment to isolate the thermalization process in graphite. The experiment was conducted at the Oak Ridge Electron Linear Accelerator facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and it measured the time spectrum of neutrons leaking from a graphite pile during slowing down and thermalization within graphite. Simulations of the benchmark experiment were performed using the MCNP6.1 Monte Carlo code and the ENDF/B-VII.1 and ENDF/B-VIII.0 cross-section databases. The benchmark provides a time spectrum (i.e., time-dependent counts in a detector) that allows for validation of the graphite thermal scattering libraries (TSLs). The impact on the simulations using a suite of graphite TSLs was compared with the experimental results. Given the density of nuclear graphite, the TSL corresponding to graphite with 30% porosity, as implemented in ENDF/B-VIII.0, was found to most accurately represent the measured time spectrum corresponding to the thermal energy range with an average deviation of ±1.7%.