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Nuclear Installations Safety
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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
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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. H. Fulmer, T. F. Ruane
Nuclear Technology | Volume 3 | Number 3 | March 1967 | Pages 191-198
Technical Paper and Note | doi.org/10.13182/NT67-A27874
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A method of determining slow neutron spectra from foil activations is described. Two sets of activants are irradiated; one set is composed of nuclides each of which has only one predominant resonance in the few electron volt (eV) region (resonance set); the other is composed of nuclides which, as a group, present a variety of absorption cross sections for neutrons in the subcadmium energy range (subcadmium set). For reliability of analysis and insensitivity to experimental uncertainties, a suitable form for the neutron spectrum is found to be basically a Maxwellian plus 1/E form with variable parameters. The spectrum is written as where K and b are parameters obtained directly from the absorption rates of the cadmium-covered resonance detectors. The remaining spectral parameters G, E0, and c are chosen to produce a spectrum from which are computed absorption rates of the irradiated foils in the subcadmium set. Values of G, E0, and c are varied until the computed absorption rates give a least-squares fit to the measured absorption rates. The activation method has been applied in two reactor cores. The predicted spectra are compared with corresponding spectra calculated by SWAK and SWAKRAUM. There is reasonably good agreement between the spectra predicted by experiment and calculation.