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Division Spotlight
Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
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.
R. W. Brandon, J. C. Robinson, C. W. Craven, Jr.
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 39 | Number 2 | February 1970 | Pages 151-162
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE70-A21195
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The problem of determining neutron flux spectra through detector activation is of wide and continued interest in the nuclear industry. Analysis of this problem has historically been divided into two areas of concern. The first area is the evaluation of the perturbation introduced into the flux field by the detector. The second area is the determination of the unperturbed energy-dependent neutron flux from the integral relationship of neutron flux to detector activity. An expression was derived which relates detector activity to the unperturbed neutron flux and the adjoint difference flux through the use of a variational approach and a transport theory description of the system. The equation was cast in discrete ordinates formalism to permit numerical solution. The self-contained adjoint problem was solved using standard techniques. The unperturbed flux was expanded as a series of Laguerre polynomials, the coefficients of which were determined through inversion of the resulting rectangular matrix. The theoretical model was examined through application to several synthetic problems. A water-moderated spectrum was examined with both perturbed and unperturbed calculations. Direct calculation of perturbed activities showed good agreement with standard activity calculations. Comparable calculations of flux spectra with perturbed and unperturbed activities showed close agreement. The flux spectrum calculations yielded good results in the thermal energy range, and analysis showed that difficulties encountered in the epithermal range were due to the polynomial expansion scheme, as has been previously observed.