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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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
TerraPower begins U.K. regulatory approval process
Seattle-based TerraPower signaled its interest this week in building its Natrium small modular reactor in the United Kingdom, the company announced.
TerraPower sent a letter to the U.K.’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, formally establishing its intention to enter the U.K. generic design assessment (GDA) process. This is TerraPower’s first step in deployment of its Natrium technology—a 345-MW sodium fast reactor coupled with a molten salt energy storage unit—on the international stage.
L. T. Fan, David F. Aldis
Nuclear Technology | Volume 32 | Number 3 | March 1977 | Pages 222-238
Technical Paper | Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT77-A31747
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The design of a cooling system for a power plant is approached as a problem in systems synthesis. The cooling system is optimized with respect to both the independent variables associated with each cooling unit and the arrangement of the cooling units in the system. A sample cooling system is optimally synthesized with two methods of systems synthesis—a structural parameter problem formulation with a direct search and a dynamic programming formulation. Other approaches are also considered. Two types of cooling units—a mechanical draft cooling tower and a cooling pond—are used in the example. The methods proposed for the development of the optimal design are sufficiently general so that any number, type, or combinations of types of cooling units could be included in the optimal systems synthesis.