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Division Spotlight
Nuclear Criticality Safety
NCSD provides communication among nuclear criticality safety professionals through the development of standards, the evolution of training methods and materials, the presentation of technical data and procedures, and the creation of specialty publications. In these ways, the division furthers the exchange of technical information on nuclear criticality safety with the ultimate goal of promoting the safe handling of fissionable materials outside reactors.
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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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.
Shaopeng Xia, Maosong Cheng, Zhimin Dai
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 194 | Number 12 | December 2020 | Pages 1143-1161
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1776057
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Burnup calculations play a very important role in nuclear reactor design and analysis, and solving burnup equations is an essential topic in burnup calculations. In the last decade, several high-accuracy methods, mainly including the Chebyshev rational approximation method (CRAM), the quadrature-based rational approximation method, the Laguerre polynomial approximation method, and the mini-max polynomial approximation method, have been proposed to solve the burnup equations. Although these methods have been demonstrated to be quite successful in the burnup calculations, limitations still exist in some cases, one of which is that the accuracy becomes compromised when treating the time-dependent polynomial external feed rate. In this work, a new method called the Padé rational approximation method (PRAM) is proposed. Without directly approximating the matrix exponential, this new method is derived by using the Padé rational function to approximate the scalar exponential function in the formula of the inverse Laplace transform of burnup equations. Several test cases are carried out to verify the proposed new method. The high accuracy of the PRAM is validated by comparing the numerical results with the high-precision reference solutions. Against CRAM, PRAM is significantly superior in handling the burnup equations with time-dependent polynomial external feed rates and is much more efficient in improving the accuracy by using substeps, which demonstrates that PRAM is the attractive method for burnup calculations.