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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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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Experimenters get access to NSUF facilities for irradiation effects studies
The Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy announced the recipients of “first call” 2025 Nuclear Science User Facilities (NSUF) Rapid Turnaround Experiment (RTE) awards on June 26. The 23 proposals selected from industry, national laboratories, and universities will receive a total of about $1.4 million. While each project is led by a different principal investigator, some call the same organization home. A total of 17 companies, labs, and universities are represented.
Emilian Popov, Kaushik Banerjee (ORNL)
Proceedings | International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management 2019 (IHLRWM 2019) | Knoxville, TN, April 14-18, 2019 | Pages 33-38
This paper describes the fissile mass and concentration necessary for a critical event to occur outside containers disposed in a bedded salt repository. The criticality limits are based on modeling mixtures of water, salt, dolomite, concrete, rust, and fissile material using a neutron/photon transport computational code. Several idealized depositional configurations of fissile material in the host rock are analyzed: homogeneous spheres and heterogeneous arrangements of plate fractures in regular arrays. Deposition of large masses and concentrations are required for criticality to occur for low enriched 235U enrichment. Homogeneous mixtures with deposition in all the porosity are more reactive at high enrichments of 235U and 239Pu. However, unlike typical engineered systems, heterogeneous configurations can be more reactive than homogeneous systems at high enrichment when deposition occurs in only a portion of the porosity and the total porosity is small, because the relationship between the porosity of the fractures and matrix also strongly influences the results.