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Division Spotlight
Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Winter Conference and Expo
November 17–21, 2024
Orlando, FL|Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld
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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Nuclear new build procurement considerations
It may seem counterintuitive, but the best time to enhance the ability to support operations and maintenance for a new plant is before construction starts. This is one of many lessons learned by the currently operating nuclear fleet. As construction and startup of many nuclear facilities was completed, it quickly became evident that the ability to efficiently support operations and maintenance was limited. Most of the information necessary to establish and manage procurement of spare and replacement items, maintenance, and configuration of the facilities was unavailable and had to be gathered on a case-by-case, “on-demand” basis. Absence of necessary information and the associated challenges resulted in the need for staff augmentation and multiyear-long projects to develop equipment bills of material and maintenance programs and to perform technical evaluations for the huge quantities of spare and replacement items being requested.
G. P. Nyalunga, V. V. Naicker
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 198 | Number 3 | March 2024 | Pages 640-657
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2205198
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development/Nuclear Energy Agency (OECD/NEA) benchmark has been established over recent years to satisfy an increasing demand from the nuclear community for best-estimate predictions accompanied by uncertainty and sensitivity analyses. The main objectives of the OECD/NEA benchmark activity are to determine uncertainties in modeling for reactor systems using best-estimate methods under steady-state and transient conditions and to quantify the impact of these uncertainties for each type of calculation in multiphysics analyses. In terms of light water reactor analyses, an international uncertainty analysis, “Benchmarks for Uncertainty Analysis in Modelling (UAM) for the Design, Operation and Safety Analysis of LWRs” is currently in progress, being coordinated by the OECD/NEA. In the neutronic phases of the benchmark, the uncertainty due to nuclear data is being studied for various LWR types.
The LCT086 benchmark, which is a VVER-type reactor criticality benchmark experiment, has been identified to form part of the validation matrix for the uncertainty methodology development. Resulting from this, the main focus of the present work is to propagate the uncertainty due to the nuclear data for two cases (LCT086/Case1 and LCT086/Case3) presented in the LCT086 benchmark. Both fuel assembly and core models were used for the analysis. The code package used to perform the calculations was SCALE 6.2.1. In particular, the function modules KENO-VI, SAMPLER, and TSUNAMI-3D of SCALE 6.2.1 were used. MCNP 6.1 was also used for continuous-energy criticality calculations.
In addition to propagating the uncertainty due to the nuclear data, the uncertainty due to selected input parameters as bounded by the manufacturing tolerances were also propagated so that the modeling methods employed could be verified against those reported in the LCT086 benchmark. The results obtained for the nuclear data uncertainty were further compared with nuclear data uncertainty propagation results for the OECD/NEA UAM Kozloduy-6 reactor system. The uncertainty in the multiplication factor is reported in pcm together with the main contributors to the uncertainty from the nuclear data reported in .