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Division Spotlight
Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
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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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.
Akihiro Kitano (JAEA), Ken Nakajima (Kyoto Univ)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 1205-1210
In the Nuclear facilities, especially Fukushima daiichi nuclear power plant, radiation exposure reduction measures have to be carried out appropriately so as to be able to work in the place. Therefore, we need to grasp the radioactive contaminations level in the area. In order to specify the place and the density of the radioactive contamination, we had to estimate the radioactive contamination density of various locations by material sampling measurement, surface smear measurement, or surface dose rate measurement with collimated radiation detectors conventionally. However, these methods require a lot of time and work. To solve this problem, we are developing the estimation method of the radioactive contamination distribution with machine learning from the spatial dose rate that can be acquired easily.
The estimation of the radioactive contamination from the spatial dose has two issues mainly. One is the difficulty of the improving estimation accuracy because of radiation scattering and attenuation with the structure in the building. The other is that it takes much time to make the accurate model with simulation and so on. With machine learning, we will be able to estimate the contamination distribution quickly, and it will lead to exposure reduction of workers. In this study, we constructed the building model of the Operating floor of Fukushima daiichi unit3(1F-3), and set the radioactive contamination on the floor divided to 10×13 mesh. We trained the relationship of the spatial dose distribution with the radioactive contamination densities, locations, and the material structures in the area.
As the result, in the case of setting the various contamination densities to the each mesh, the estimated contamination densities were consistent with the setting contamination densities. Therefore, the feasibility of this method was confirmed.
