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Division Spotlight
Young Members Group
The Young Members Group works to encourage and enable all young professional members to be actively involved in the efforts and endeavors of the Society at all levels (Professional Divisions, ANS Governance, Local Sections, etc.) as they transition from the role of a student to the role of a professional. It sponsors non-technical workshops and meetings that provide professional development and networking opportunities for young professionals, collaborates with other Divisions and Groups in developing technical and non-technical content for topical and national meetings, encourages its members to participate in the activities of the Groups and Divisions that are closely related to their professional interests as well as in their local sections, introduces young members to the rules and governance structure of the Society, and nominates young professionals for awards and leadership opportunities available to members.
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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2025
Nuclear Technology
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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.
Alvin J. H. Lee, Lucas Wodrich, Dimitri Kalinichenko, Caleb S. Brooks, Tomasz Kozlowski
Nuclear Technology | Volume 210 | Number 6 | June 2024 | Pages 1027-1041
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2023.2276999
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The potential deployment of microreactors as a zero-emission source for critical applications within integrated energy systems such as microgrids has been gaining interest in recent years owing to the microreactors’ dispatchable nature, modular design, small site footprint, and carbon-free generation. A particularly high-value but challenging application with rapidly growing demand is in the deployment of high-performance computing (HPC) clusters within microgrids. In this work, a model of a HPC cluster in an energy-diverse microgrid is developed to determine the requirements of a technology-agnostic microreactor deployed for such a challenging application. The minute-resolution simulations revealed that the cluster’s electrical load fluctuation of up to 4.1 MW/min required a fast and responsive load-following capability. When the load-following capability of the microreactor was perturbed, the required microgrid storage capacity associated with having a 0.1 MW/min dispatchable microreactor decreased by two orders of magnitude as compared with load-following solely by energy storage devices, indicating that load-following capability in microreactors is of great value in such applications. The analysis methods described in this work can be extended to other microgrids, other HPC clusters, or other types of challenging applications, and can help microgrid planners in determining the storage size, output capacity, and ramping capabilities of the storage devices required for a given microgrid configuration.