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Division Spotlight
Isotopes & Radiation
Members are devoted to applying nuclear science and engineering technologies involving isotopes, radiation applications, and associated equipment in scientific research, development, and industrial processes. Their interests lie primarily in education, industrial uses, biology, medicine, and health physics. Division committees include Analytical Applications of Isotopes and Radiation, Biology and Medicine, Radiation Applications, Radiation Sources and Detection, and Thermal Power Sources.
Meeting Spotlight
Utility Working Conference and Vendor Technology Expo (UWC 2024)
August 4–7, 2024
Marco Island, FL|JW Marriott Marco Island
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
Vogtle-3 shuts down for valve issue
One of the new Vogtle units in Georgia was shut down unexpectedly on Monday last week for a valve issue that has since been investigated and repaired. According to multiple local news outlets, Georgia Power reported on July 17 that Unit 3 was back in service.
Southern Company spokesperson Jacob Hawkins confirmed that Vogtle-3 went off line at 9:25 p.m. local time on July 8 “due to lowering water levels in the steam generators caused by a valve issue on one of the three main feedwater pumps.”
Nicolas P. Leclaire, Jacques A. Anno, Gérard Courtois, Pascal Dannus, Gilles Poullot, Veronique Rouyer
Nuclear Technology | Volume 144 | Number 3 | December 2003 | Pages 303-323
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT03-A3447
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Up to now, criticality safety experts used density laws fitted on experimental data and applied them outside the measurement range. Depending on the case, such an approach could be wrong for nitrate solutions. Seven components are concerned: UO2(NO3)2, U(NO3)4, Pu(NO3)4, Pu(NO3)3, Th(NO3)4, Am(NO3)3, and HNO3. To obviate this problem, a new methodology based on the thermodynamic concept of mixtures of binary electrolytes solutions (one electrolyte + water) at constant water activity, a so-called "isopiestic" solution, has been developed by the Institute de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire (IRSN) to calculate the nitrate solutions density. This paper presents its qualification by using criticality experiments. The theory and the implementation are also given.Qualification results of the uranyl and plutonium nitrate solutions show that the new density law (also called the isopiestic law) is in good agreement with the benchmarks. Thus, no bias is put into evidence for the uranium solutions, and a small negative bias equal to 0.2% is found for the plutonium solutions.Moreover, the isopiestic law corrects the observed 1% overestimation of keff due to the empirical IRSN Leroy and Jouan density law for uranium solutions and the observed 3.4% underestimation of keff due to the ARH-600 density law for plutonium solutions.The isopiestic density law has been implemented in CIGALES V2.0, the graphical user interface of the French criticality safety package CRISTAL that calculates the atom densities of nuclides (and writes the input file for CRISTAL computations).