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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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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.
G. W. Morton, B. D. Shumaker, D. E. McCarter, S. D. Caylor, P. D. Brukiewa (AMS)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 829-838
Obsolescence, aging, reliability, and performance issues are driving nuclear facilities to replace conventional analog Instrumentation and Control (I&C) systems with digital technologies. In addition, the designs of the next generation of nuclear reactors, including Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), will incorporate digital I&C for most, if not all, of their safety and non-safety related functions. As part of a research and development (R&D) effort under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Analysis and Measurement Services Corporation (AMS) developed a platform to provide automated testing of digital I&C systems and create a standard method of evaluation for reliability assessments. This hands-on R&D effort has produced a Software Reliability Tester (SRT), which is a set of software tools designed to automate the testing of digital I&C systems to measure and quantify how well the system performs under normal operating conditions and in the presence of faults. Furthermore, the SRT provides the foundation for a practical tool to automate verification and validation (V&V) activities and reduce the amount of testing time of digital I&C systems. When combined with its capabilities of integrating both reliability and fault tolerance quantification, the SRT can be used to ensure that digital I&C implementations are both safe and cost-effective for the nuclear industry. This paper describes the application of the SRT with fault injection to automate V&V activities for a new Digital Rod Position Indication (DRPI) coil diagnostic system. The DRPI coil diagnostic system is a digital system that monitors the DRPI coil voltages of typical DRPI systems in nuclear power plants to detect and diagnose faults. For this application, the SRT was configured to exercise the inputs of the DRPI coil diagnostic system during rod movement while exposing the system to electromagnetic interference (EMI) at various amplitudes and frequencies. These test cases were applied by the SRT hardware as voltage inputs to the DRPI coil diagnostic system and the outputs were compared to expected values generated by a model of the DRPI coil diagnostic system. Included in the paper is a description of the overall design of the SRT including the hardware and software architectures. As described in the paper, V&V using the SRT demonstrates the benefits of automated testing and fault tolerance qualification to provide a quantitative assessment of reliability and cost effective implementation of digital I&C in existing and next generation nuclear power plants.
