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Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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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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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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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.
Lorenzo P. Pagani, George E. Apostolakis
Nuclear Technology | Volume 153 | Number 1 | January 2006 | Pages 9-17
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT06-A3685
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The work presented in this paper is part of the broader issue of quantification of safety margins within a load-capacity framework in which uncertainties in loads and capacities are identified and quantified. The present paper describes an example of quantification of uncertainty in the capacity, i.e., the fuel failure enthalpy given a burnup level. The phenomena arising at high burnup are characterized by large uncertainties, as indicated by the scatter in the experimental data. We propose a framework for the probabilistic analysis of the failure limit, i.e., the enthalpy at failure, as a function of burnup. As an example, we obtain the distribution of the failure enthalpy for a Ziracloy-4 rod subjected to a reactivity-initiated accident in a pressurized water reactor by propagating the relevant uncertainties. We use the FRAPCON and FRAPTRAN computer codes, as well as a model for the probability of spallation, to simulate the transient and to obtain data points to derive the conditional probability distribution of the failure enthalpy at a given burnup level. The final results show that the distribution of the failure enthalpy shifts to lower values as burnup increases and that spallation is an important phenomenon.