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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Risk-informed, performance-based design in INL’s MARVEL reactor
The American Nuclear Society’s Risk-informed, Performance-based Principles and Policy Committee (RP3C) has held another presentation in its monthly Community of Practice (CoP) series. Former RP3C chair N. Prasad Kadambi opened the meeting with brief introductory remarks about the RP3C and the need for new approaches to nuclear design that go beyond conventional and deterministic methods. He then welcomed this month’s speaker: Doug Gerstner, a nuclear safety engineer at Idaho National Laboratory, who presented “Application of a Qualitative RIPB Approach for the MARVEL Microreactor at INL.”
Watch the full webinar here.
Sedat Goluoglu, R. T. Primm III
Nuclear Technology | Volume 139 | Number 1 | July 2002 | Pages 80-88
Technical Note | Criticality of Nuclear Materials | doi.org/10.13182/NT02-A3306
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Criticality of low-enriched-uranium (LEU) and mixed-oxide (MOX) assemblies at the VVER-1000-type Balakovo nuclear power plant is investigated. Effective multiplication factors for fresh fuel assemblies on the railroad platform, fresh fuel assemblies in the within-plant fuel transportation vehicle, and fresh fuel assemblies in the spent fuel storage pool are calculated. If there is no absorber between the units, the configurations with all MOX assemblies result in higher effective multiplication factors than the configurations with all LEU assemblies when the system is dry. When the systems are flooded, the configurations with all LEU assemblies result in higher effective multiplication factors. For normal operating conditions, effective multiplication factors for all configurations are below the presumed upper subcritical limit of 0.95. For an accident condition of a fully loaded within-plant fuel transportation vehicle that is "flooded" with low-density water (possibly from a fire suppression system), the presumed upper subcritical limit is exceeded by configurations containing either LEU or a combination of LEU and MOX assemblies.
