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Division Spotlight
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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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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.
Marzio Marseguerra, Enrico Zio, Raffaele Canetta
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 153 | Number 2 | June 2006 | Pages 124-136
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE06-A2600
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For realistic systems, a dynamic approach to reliability analysis is likely to require a significant increase in the computational efforts, due to the need of integrating the dynamic evolution with its characteristic times. Thus, it becomes mandatory to resort to validated, simplified models of process evolution. Such models are typically based on lumped effective parameters whose values need to be suitably estimated so as to best fit to the available plant data.In this paper we propose a multiobjective genetic algorithm approach for the estimation of the effective parameters of a simplified model of nuclear reactor dynamics. The calibration of the effective parameters is achieved by best fitting the model responses of the quantities of interest to the actual evolution profiles. A case study is reported in which the real reactor is simulated by the QUAndry-based Reactor Kinetics (QUARK) code available from the Nuclear Energy Agency, and the simplified model is based on the point-kinetics approximation to describe the neutron balance in the core and on thermal equilibrium relations to describe the energy exchange between the different loops. The (pseudo)measured quantities of interest are the reactor power and the average fuel temperature.