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Nuclear Criticality Safety
NCSD provides communication among nuclear criticality safety professionals through the development of standards, the evolution of training methods and materials, the presentation of technical data and procedures, and the creation of specialty publications. In these ways, the division furthers the exchange of technical information on nuclear criticality safety with the ultimate goal of promoting the safe handling of fissionable materials outside reactors.
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Utility Working Conference and Vendor Technology Expo (UWC 2024)
August 4–7, 2024
Marco Island, FL|JW Marriott Marco Island
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
Waste retrieval underway on third set of underground tanks at Hanford
Work crews have started retrieval of radioactive and chemical waste from a third set of underground storage tanks at the Hanford Site, according to the Department of Energy's Office of Environmental Management. Contractor Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) is retrieving and transferring more than 325,000 gallons of waste from the single-shell Tank A-101 at the site's A Tank Farm. The waste is being sent to a newer double-shell tank for continued safe storage.
Retrieval activities began one month after workers emptied the site’s 21st single-shell tank. Waste removed from the 21 tanks totals about 3 million gallons.
Enrique Ramos, Jose E. Roman, Agustín Abarca, Rafael Miró, Juan A. Bermejo, Alberto Ortego, Jose M. Posada
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 187 | Number 3 | September 2017 | Pages 254-267
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2017.1320892
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Thanks to advances in computer technology, it is feasible to obtain detailed reactor core descriptions for safety analysis of the light water reactor (LWR), in order to represent realistically the fuel elements design, as is the case for three-dimensional coupled simulations for local neutron kinetics and thermal hydraulics. This scenario requires an efficient thermal-hydraulic code that can produce a response in a reasonable time for large-scale, detailed models. In two-fluid codes, such as the thermal-hydraulic subchannel code COBRA-TF, the time restriction is even more important, since the set of equations to be solved is more complex. We have developed a message passing interface parallel version of COBRA-TF, called pCTF. The parallel code is based on a cell-oriented domain decomposition approach, and performs well in models that consist of many cells. The Jacobian matrix is computed in parallel, with each processor in charge of calculating the coefficients related to a subset of the cells. Furthermore, the resulting system of linear equations is also solved in parallel, by exploiting solvers and preconditioners from PETSc. The goal of this study is to demonstrate the capability of the recently developed pCTF/PARCS coupled code to simulate large cores with a pin-by-pin level of detail in an acceptable computational time, using for this purpose two control rod drop operational transients that took place in the core of a three-loop pressurized water reactor. As a result, the main safety parameters of the core hot channel have been calculated by the coupled code in a pin level of detail, obtaining best estimate results for this transient.