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.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
May 2026
Jan 2026
2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2026
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Savannah River marks the closure of another legacy waste tank
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management has received concurrence from regulators that Tank 14 at the Savannah River Site has reached preliminary cease waste removal (PCWR) status after radioactive liquid waste was successfully removed from the tank. PCWR is a regulatory milestone in the closure of SRS’s old-style waste tanks, which were built in the 1950s to store waste generated by the chemical separations of plutonium and uranium.
Peiwei Sun, Ji Feng, Xianbao Yuan, Liang Zhao, Furong Liu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 199 | Number 1 | July 2017 | Pages 35-46
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1322396
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Canadian SuperCritical Water-cooled Reactor (SCWR) is a once-through pressure tube–type SCWR under development in Canada. It is a multivariable system with strong cross coupling and a high degree of nonlinearity. The outputs are sensitive to disturbances, and the variations in the thermal parameters should be limited to avoid thermal stress to its components. Therefore, designing an adequate control system is challenging. In this paper, robust multivariable feedback control and feedforward control are proposed to design the control system of the Canadian SCWR. Three uncertainty sources are considered: unmodeled uncertainty, linearization uncertainty, and model reduction uncertainty. These uncertainties are evaluated taking into account all aspects affecting the linear dynamic model used in the robust controller synthesis, and the uncertainty bounds are determined to cover the uncertainties. The robust feedback controller is synthesized using the μ-synthesis approach. The feedforward control is added to the robust feedback control to further improve the control performance. It is obtained through disturbance compensation features for a feedforward controller. The control performance of the hybrid control system is evaluated based on the nonlinear simulation by introducing different setpoint changes. The designed control system can stabilize the Canadian SCWR, and the control performance is satisfactory.