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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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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ANS joins others in seeking to discuss SNF/HLW impasse
The American Nuclear Society joined seven other organizations to send a letter to Energy Secretary Christopher Wright on July 8, asking to meet with him to discuss “the restoration of a highly functioning program to meet DOE’s legal responsibility to manage and dispose of the nation’s commercial and legacy defense spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and high-level radioactive waste (HLW).”
John D. Metzger, Mohamed S. El-Genk,Alexander G. Parlos
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 109 | Number 2 | October 1991 | Pages 171-187
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE91-A28516
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To ensure that a space nuclear power system will operate safely and respond in a predictable and desired manner, the system’s controller design must account for changes in the system parameters over its lifetime. A model reference adaptive controller is applied to enable the actual space nuclear power system to follow a predictable and desired response of a reference model system, despite changes in the actual system’s operating parameters. Model reference adaptive control is well developed for linear systems and has been applied to simple, single-input, single-output (and the output’s derivative) systems. Model reference adaptive control is applied to a single-input, multiple-output nonlinear system but also shows the development for a multiple-input, multiple-output linear system. An algorithm is developed for linear systems to determine the constant gains in the model reference adaptive control algorithm and a method is developed that allows selective weighting of a desired state variable. Examples are presented to show that a model reference adaptive controller can ensure the load-following response of a nonlinear space nuclear power system and that the reference model can be complex enough to embody the physics of the plant. The results of the example cases show that a model reference adaptive controller can cause a selected nonlinear plant state variable to track the transient trajectory of the corresponding state variable of the reference model with local stability.