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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 8–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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DNFSB’s Summers ends board tenure, extending agency’s loss of quorum
Lee
Summers
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, the independent agency responsible for ensuring that Department of Energy facilities are protective of public health and safety, announced that the board’s acting chairman, Thomas Summers, has concluded his service with the agency, having completed his second term as a board member on October 18.
Summers’ departure leaves Patricia Lee, who joined the DNFSB after being confirmed by the Senate in July 2024, as the board’s only remaining member and acting chair. Lee’s DNFSB board term ends in October 2027.
Douglas J. Rzepecki
Nuclear Technology | Volume 69 | Number 3 | June 1985 | Pages 279-292
Technical Paper | Nuclear Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT85-A33611
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The time-dependent radiation transport for a demonstration scale liquid-metal-cooled fast breeder reactor that has undergone a severe loss of sodium coolant is calculated with both a discrete ordinates and a diffusion theory solution for the real neutron flux shape. It is found that diffusion theory underpredicts reactivity levels by about $6 when compared to discrete ordinates. It is also found that the use of an initial adjoint neutron flux throughout the transient as a reactivity weighting function could seriously underpredict reactivity levels for a severely degraded reactor core. In both cases, there was an immediate termination of the excursion. The uncertainty of being limited to two fuel fields for an end of equilibrium cycle reactor core in SIMMER-II during the transient was greater than that due to microscopic cross-section shielding factor iteration and interpolation schemes. Fifty-energy-group reactivity coefficients were best duplicated in collapsing to a ten-energy-group set with an entire reactor integrated bilinear neutron energy flux spectrum.