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Division Spotlight
Accelerator Applications
The division was organized to promote the advancement of knowledge of the use of particle accelerator technologies for nuclear and other applications. It focuses on production of neutrons and other particles, utilization of these particles for scientific or industrial purposes, such as the production or destruction of radionuclides significant to energy, medicine, defense or other endeavors, as well as imaging and diagnostics.
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.
Junyung Kim, Inseop Jeon, Sanghun Lee, Hyun Gook Kang (RPI)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 10-23
It has been a challenge in dynamic probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) world that a large number of scenarios from one initiating event with time-related scenario evolutions give complexness on an understanding of the transient/accident scenarios. The understanding of risk which enhances the safety of the entire system requires not only the full understandings of scenario evolutions but also the key characteristics of the events: Both success events and failed events. Since the time evolution is now in consideration of the plant risk assessment, a lot of difficulties such as organizing such large amounts of information and interpreting its physical meaning should be properly resolved. Clustering analysis, one of the unsupervised machine learning (ML) techniques, has been discussed in years to group scenarios with similar characteristics and to identify key patterns of each group so that an analyst can understand entire scenario behaviors by groups. Here we propose a novel methodology of identifying key patterns of scenarios in an accident case of a nuclear power plant system with dynamic reliability analysis. In clustering analysis four items need to be considered: 1Clustering algorithm, 2distance matrix, 3variables in clustering algorithm, and 4cluster validity evaluation. In this paper, partition around medoids (PAM) clustering algorithm with global alignment (GA) kernel distance is utilized. GA kernel, which is considered suitable for clustering time series data, is to assess the similarity between time series data by casting the dynamic time warping (DTW) distances and similarities as positive definite kernels. In order to find variables which will be embedded in the clustering algorithm, multilevel flow model (MFM) methodology is leveraged. For a case study, dynamic PRA tool, MOSAIQUE (Module for SAmpling Input and QUantifying Estimator) coupled with a RELAP-5 generates 2,500 scenarios of SBLOCA. Advanced power reactor 1400 MWe (APR- 1400) is used as a reference plant model. The proposed classification and identification approach has grouped the 8000 scenarios with only 77 clusters and the result can show key patterns shown in core damaged and safe cases which static PRA may not present.