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Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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Norway’s Halden reactor takes first step toward decommissioning
The government of Norway has granted the transfer of the Halden research reactor from the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) to the state agency Norwegian Nuclear Decommissioning (NND). The 25-MWt Halden boiling water reactor operated from 1958 to 2018 and was used in the research of nuclear fuel, reactor internals, plant procedures and monitoring, and human factors.
R. G. Fluharty, F. B. Simpson, and G. J. Russell, J. H. Menzel
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 35 | Number 1 | January 1969 | Pages 45-69
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE69-A21113
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Pulsed reactors are being investigated for the purpose of producing high-intensity pulsed-neutron beams for research. Leakage-emission-time-distribution measurements as a function of neutron energy have been carried out using the Resselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) electron linear accelerator in conjunction with a disk chopper and neutron diffraction spectrometer. Data were obtained simultaneously with the chopper and crystal spectrometer by looking at opposite sides of the moderator. This experiment was designed to investigate the importance of different variables in determining the pulse characteristics of moderators. The eventual objective is to optimize the maximum thermal-neutron intensity and minimum pulse width from pulsed-fission-neutron sources. Neutron time and energy distributions were measured for light water, polyethylene, Lucite (a metacrylate plastic), powdered zirconium hydride, and ammonia. The water, polyethylene, and zirconium-hydride samples were measured at room temperature and all the materials except water were also measured at liquid-nitrogen temperature. The effects on pulse characteristics of homogeneously poisoning light water samples were studied, as well as the effects of heterogeneously poisoning polyethylene. The effect of varying the thickness of the moderator was also investigated. Pulse widths at half-maximum of 11 µsec at 0.05096 eV and 24 µ sec at 0.01274 eV were observed for solid ammonia and heterogeneously poisoned polyethylene samples. For neutron energies between 0.08 and 0.01274 eV, solid ammonia gave the best observed figure of merit, peak intensity/ (FWHM)2. The data show that neutron pulse characteristics from a moderator can be altered significantly by varying the material and its temperature, as well as by adding poison and optimizing the geometry. Time distributions were observed in the energy region of 0.012 to 0.63 eV. The time resolution, in this energy region, for the diffraction spectrometer ranged from 2.8 to 10.8 µ sec compared with 7.6 µ sec for the chopper.