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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
Utility Working Conference and Vendor Technology Expo (UWC 2024)
August 4–7, 2024
Marco Island, FL|JW Marriott Marco Island
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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Jun 2024
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Nuclear Science and Engineering
August 2024
Nuclear Technology
July 2024
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
NRC engineers share their expertise at the University of Puerto Rico
Robert Roche-Rivera and Marcos Rolón-Acevedo are licensed professional engineers who work at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They are also alumni of the University of Puerto Rico–Mayagüez (UPRM) and have been sharing their knowledge and experience with students at their alma mater since last year, serving as adjunct professors in the university’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. During the 2023–2024 school year, they each taught two courses: Fundamentals of Nuclear Science and Engineering, and Nuclear Power Plant Engineering.
Adam J. Rau, William J. Walters
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 195 | Number 10 | October 2021 | Pages 1017-1035
Technical | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2021.1905431
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Monte Carlo methods are useful for simulating new reactor designs, but even with advances in computing, these methods still require a significant amount of time to perform transient or multiphysics calculations coupled with thermal modeling.
This work demonstrates a hybrid reactor physics method that uses Monte Carlo to precalculate an initial database of fission matrix parameters, then combines these results for fast calculations on arbitrary system states. This paper extends previous work that demonstrated these methods on the Penn State Breazeale Reactor (PSBR). Approaches for reducing time and memory cost and increasing the accuracy in reproducing Monte Carlo output are considered. For modeling fuel temperature, a representative temperature distribution is used while tallying the initial fission matrix database. Different approaches for modeling the coupling between individual control rod insertions as well as control and fuel temperature effects are presented as well.
Individual solutions are completed in less than 1 s on a single core, and error with respect to Monte Carlo is within 35 pcm for multiplication factor, 0.6% root-mean square, and 2.8% maximum for the normalized three-dimensional fission source distribution on critical, steady-state configurations. Further qualification on different reactor types is needed, but the simplicity and flexibility of this method make further development promising.