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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.
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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May 2025
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.
Qingmin Zhang, Zhigang Hu, Bangjie Deng, Mengxuan Xu, Yuhang Guo
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 186 | Number 3 | June 2017 | Pages 293-302
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2016.1273619
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The self-powered neutron detector (SPND) is popularly used as an in-core neutron flux monitor in reactors due to its simple structure, self-powered feature. However, its response delay needs compensation to obtain the actual real-time neutron flux for reactor control and protection. In this paper, a simple iterative method for compensating SPND response delay is proposed as well as noise filtering. Two favorable noise filtering methods were compared, and then, the moving average filter was chosen. The governing differential equations were established according to decay mechanism, and then, iterative compensation relations for delay compensation were established by discretization with simplicity and flexibility. The test result shows that the compensated response delay for a prompt jump of neutron flux is only 0.9 s, indicating its effectiveness. Furthermore, the dependence on initial conditions and sampling time interval was also studied, indicating that two initial condition determination modes for two typical detector start-up situations can be chosen correspondingly for delay minimization and critical sampling with a time interval of about 0.7 s, which shows consistency with the Von Neumann stability analysis. Finally, our method has been compared with the Z-transform method and verified with measured current, which showed its better performance.