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Nuclear Installations Safety
Devoted specifically to the safety of nuclear installations and the health and safety of the public, this division seeks a better understanding of the role of safety in the design, construction and operation of nuclear installation facilities. The division also promotes engineering and scientific technology advancement associated with the safety of such facilities.
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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
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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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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.
Aurélien Ledieu, François Devreux, Philippe Barboux, Yves Minet
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 153 | Number 3 | July 2006 | Pages 285-300
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE06-A2614
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper proposes a contribution to understanding the alteration of high-level waste glasses. Numerical simulations, based on a Monte Carlo model, have been performed in parallel to static dissolution tests on simplified glasses. The leaching of borosilicate glasses has been investigated for various compositions containing three or four oxides, which have been derived from the French nuclear glass composition. The comparison between experimental data and simulations allows a precise understanding of the role of each element. The degree of alteration is shown to result from a competition between the irreversible extraction of the soluble species (boron and alkalis) and the reversible dissolution-condensation dynamics of silica, which make possible the restructuring of the surface layer into a passivating layer. The model explains how the surface layer is responsible for the blocking or, at least, for a considerable slowing down of the alteration. It is also able to explain a quite unexpected result, namely, the fact that the replacement of silica by more insoluble oxides (zirconium or aluminum oxides) actually induces an increase of the degree of alteration. This is due to the slowing down of the surface layer reconstruction that delays the alteration blocking.