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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.
Marvin Tetenbaum, Larry Mishler, Glenn Schnizlein
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 14 | Number 3 | November 1962 | Pages 230-238
doi.org/10.13182/NSE62-A26211
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Because ignition temperature is not an intrinsic property of a substance, the investigation reported in this paper was undertaken to measure the ignition behavior of uranium powder under well-defined boundary conditions such that quantitative predictions are possible. The ignition behavior of uranium powder has been found to be dependent on specific area of powder fraction, rate of heating, and geometry of sample. For a given mesh size powder and heating rate, constant limiting ignition temperature values are obtained practically independent of container size, when the powder bed exceeds a critical height. Critical height values are found to increase with particle size of powder; for a given particle size powder, critical height values decrease with heating rate. On the basis of the Frank-Kamenetskii theory of thermal explosions, when used in a restricted manner, limiting ignition temperature values for uranium powder can be estimated using critical height values as the significant geometrical dimension of the container. These calculated ignition temperatures are in reasonable agreement with those obtained with our experimental apparatus. The ignition behavior of uranium powder can be adequately described by converting isothermal expressions to a rising temperature basis according to the treatment of Murray, Buddery, and Taylor.