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Division Spotlight
Materials Science & Technology
The objectives of MSTD are: promote the advancement of materials science in Nuclear Science Technology; support the multidisciplines which constitute it; encourage research by providing a forum for the presentation, exchange, and documentation of relevant information; promote the interaction and communication among its members; and recognize and reward its members for significant contributions to the field of materials science in nuclear technology.
Meeting Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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
NextGen MURR Working Group established in Missouri
The University of Missouri’s Board of Curators has created the NextGen MURR Working Group to serve as a strategic advisory body for the development of the NextGen MURR (University of Missouri Research Reactor).
Joseph Oncken, Linyu Lin, Vivek Agarwal
Nuclear Technology | Volume 210 | Number 12 | December 2024 | Pages 2274-2289
Review Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2024.2342206
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Microreactors, a specific class of nuclear reactor, feature a thermal power output of <20 MW, with intended use cases ranging from power production for remote localities and industrial facilities, to military applications, to disaster relief. Because the remote locations of these reactors make repairs difficult, and with continuous power production being essential for the intended use cases, the control system for microreactors should be able to operate or safely shut down the reactor under abnormal conditions (e.g. cases of component failure). The nuclear industry is currently pursuing various microreactor designs, one of which is the heat pipe (HP)–cooled microreactor. A potential failure mechanism in this type of microreactor is individual HP failure. The present work explores the notion that even if a single HP fails, an HP-cooled microreactor may still be controllable in its degraded state. A framework is presented for the stable control of an HP-cooled microreactor system’s thermal output power and temperature regulation under both normal and HP failure conditions, using adaptive model predictive control (A-MPC). A-MPC was implemented for its ability to maintain optimal controller performance under changing plant state and system constraints. The complex, nonlinear physical phenomena present in an HP-cooled microreactor make using a physics-based model as the A-MPC controller’s internal predictor impractical. Thus, a data-based surrogate predictor model was developed for use under both normal and HP failure conditions.
The subject under study is a 37-HP system intended to simulate the HP and core thermal behavior of an HP-cooled microreactor. This system was modeled and simulated in DireWolf, a Multiphysics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE)–based application designed to simulate HP-cooled microreactors. The resulting model was used to generate training data for the data-based predictor model and served as the plant simulator when coupled with the A-MPC controller. This paper presents the data-based predictor model of the 37-HP system, the A-MPC controller architecture that proved suitable under both normal and HP failure microreactor conditions, and the performance of the controller when coupled with the DireWolf simulation of the 37-HP system under both normal and HP failure conditions.