ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Division Spotlight
Robotics & Remote Systems
The Mission of the Robotics and Remote Systems Division is to promote the development and application of immersive simulation, robotics, and remote systems for hazardous environments for the purpose of reducing hazardous exposure to individuals, reducing environmental hazards and reducing the cost of performing work.
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
May 2025
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.
J. T. Mihalczo, E. D. Blakeman, V. K. Paré, T. E. Valentine, D. J. Auslander
Nuclear Technology | Volume 103 | Number 3 | September 1993 | Pages 346-379
Technical Paper | Nuclear Criticality Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT93-3
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The subcritical neutron multiplication factors k for two parallel, axially separated, flat cylindrical tanks separated up to 57.91 cm in air and containing enriched uranyl (93.1 wt% 235U) nitrate solution (71.6-cm-i.d. tanks, 8.91-cm solution thickness, 1.555 g/cm3 solution density, and 404 g U/ℓ uranium density) were measured by the 252Cf-source-driven noise analysis method with measured k values varying from 0.99 to 0.80. These measurements were performed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Critical Experiments Facility in 1989 and were part of the program of Westinghouse Idaho Nuclear Company (WINCO) to benchmark calculations for the design of the new storage system at Idaho National Engineering Laboratory. Initial subcriticality measurements by the source-jerk method at LANL had indicated that at a calculated neutron multiplication factor k = 0.95, the measured k was 0.975. This discrepancy was of concern to WINCO because the new storage facility was being designed with a k limit of 0.95, and thus, half of the criticality safety margin of the storage design was equal to the discrepancy between early measurements and calculations. The 252Cf-source-driven noise analysis measurements confirmed the validity of the calculational methods. In addition to providing the neutron multiplication factor from point-kinetics interpretation of the data, these measurements also provided the auto-power and crosspower spectral densities as a function of frequency, which can be calculated directly with recently developed Monte Carlo methods and thus could also be used to validate calculational methods and cross-section sets. As with previous measurements with loosely coupled systems, a modified point-kinetics interpretation was successfully used to obtain neutron multiplication factors for measurements with the californium source and detectors located on the same tank. Although the californium source is located on axis but asymmetrically in the system, the detectors adjacent to the radial surface were sufficiently far apart that the correlated information was from long fission chains, which are distributed throughout the system of two tanks. The subcritical neutron multiplication factors obtained from the break frequency noise analysis method agreed with those from the 252Cf-source-driven noise method. These measurements confirmed the criteria from previous experiments for location of the source and detectors to obtain the neutron multiplication factor by using a modified point-kinetics interpretation of the data and again verified the usefulness of this method for interacting systems.