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Division Spotlight
Reactor Physics
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.
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.
Kwang-Il Ahn, Hee-Dong Kim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 130 | Number 2 | May 2000 | Pages 132-144
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT00-A3082
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Continuous efforts to identify and better understand the uncertainties have changed many model parameters and physical phenomena employed in the phenomenological transient models or related computer codes to be estimated by more detailed models. Since their true forms are often not known, however, different modeling assumptions have resulted in various forms of model elements even for a given phenomenon, allowing for different results in the code predictions. In a situation in which there are no rigorous ways to decide the credibility of a specific model element over another, these different model elements can become additional contributors to an overall uncertainty of the physical model predictions. In recent times, most uncertainty analyses of physical models have been focused on the model parameters, without considering the impact of these different model elements. Such levels of uncertainty analysis can only explore a subspace of the true uncertainty space of physical models, and thus the resultant uncertainty tends to underestimate the magnitude of possible uncertainties. Regarding the modeling sources of uncertainty, on the other hand, a model sensitivity analysis has been conventionally utilized to assess the effects of each model element on the code predictions. However, such types of analysis cannot systematically account for synergistic effects of all constituent model elements on the code predictions. A formal procedure is provided for characterizing probabilistically two different sources of uncertainty addressed in the phenomenological transient models (i.e., parametric and modeling sources) and their statistical propagation to obtain the overall uncertainties in the physical model predictions.