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Division Spotlight
Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
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.
R. J. DiMelfi, L. W. Deitrich
Nuclear Technology | Volume 43 | Number 3 | May 1979 | Pages 328-337
Technical Paper | Fuel | doi.org/10.13182/NT79-A19221
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The microstructural response of fast breeder reactor fuel to accident transients has been analyzed. Based on experimental results, fuel response can be classified as either basically brittle or basically ductile in nature. In the analysis, the type of response is assumed to be determined by the behavior of grain boundary fission gas. The transient variables taken into consideration are the temperature, heating rate, the mean gas content per bubble, mean bubble spacing in the grain boundary, and the stresses resolved normal to grain boundaries containing gas bubbles. By calculating the rate at which a grain boundary bubble grows as a sharp crack and comparing it to the rate of bubble growth by mass transport, a criterion is established to predict the characteristic response of a fuel sample to a specified thermal transient. A swelling threshold time is also determined for the case of ductile fuel behavior. Tensile stresses applied to the grain boundary are shown to enhance brittle behavior, and compressive stresses are shown to enhance ductile behavior. When average values of the relevant variables are extracted from a number of fission gas release and direct electric heating experiments and are used in the above calculation, fuel behavior predictions for these tests are found to correspond well with the experimental results.