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Division Spotlight
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
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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May 2025
Nuclear Technology
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Latest News
TerraPower begins U.K. regulatory approval process
Seattle-based TerraPower signaled its interest this week in building its Natrium small modular reactor in the United Kingdom, the company announced.
TerraPower sent a letter to the U.K.’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, formally establishing its intention to enter the U.K. generic design assessment (GDA) process. This is TerraPower’s first step in deployment of its Natrium technology—a 345-MW sodium fast reactor coupled with a molten salt energy storage unit—on the international stage.
G. P. Nyalunga, V. V. Naicker
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 198 | Number 3 | March 2024 | Pages 640-657
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2205198
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development/Nuclear Energy Agency (OECD/NEA) benchmark has been established over recent years to satisfy an increasing demand from the nuclear community for best-estimate predictions accompanied by uncertainty and sensitivity analyses. The main objectives of the OECD/NEA benchmark activity are to determine uncertainties in modeling for reactor systems using best-estimate methods under steady-state and transient conditions and to quantify the impact of these uncertainties for each type of calculation in multiphysics analyses. In terms of light water reactor analyses, an international uncertainty analysis, “Benchmarks for Uncertainty Analysis in Modelling (UAM) for the Design, Operation and Safety Analysis of LWRs” is currently in progress, being coordinated by the OECD/NEA. In the neutronic phases of the benchmark, the uncertainty due to nuclear data is being studied for various LWR types.
The LCT086 benchmark, which is a VVER-type reactor criticality benchmark experiment, has been identified to form part of the validation matrix for the uncertainty methodology development. Resulting from this, the main focus of the present work is to propagate the uncertainty due to the nuclear data for two cases (LCT086/Case1 and LCT086/Case3) presented in the LCT086 benchmark. Both fuel assembly and core models were used for the analysis. The code package used to perform the calculations was SCALE 6.2.1. In particular, the function modules KENO-VI, SAMPLER, and TSUNAMI-3D of SCALE 6.2.1 were used. MCNP 6.1 was also used for continuous-energy criticality calculations.
In addition to propagating the uncertainty due to the nuclear data, the uncertainty due to selected input parameters as bounded by the manufacturing tolerances were also propagated so that the modeling methods employed could be verified against those reported in the LCT086 benchmark. The results obtained for the nuclear data uncertainty were further compared with nuclear data uncertainty propagation results for the OECD/NEA UAM Kozloduy-6 reactor system. The uncertainty in the multiplication factor is reported in pcm together with the main contributors to the uncertainty from the nuclear data reported in .
