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Division Spotlight
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
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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June 2025
Nuclear Technology
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May 2025
Latest News
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.
Pi-En Tsai, Lawrence H. Heilbronn
Nuclear Technology | Volume 192 | Number 3 | December 2015 | Pages 222-231
Technical Paper | Radiation Transport and Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT14-130
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Stopping target measurements with energetic ion beams are important for building and validating physics models used to predict nuclear fragmentation fields created by interactions between incoming primary ions and target materials. However, the values of the ratio of primary ion range R to target depth d (R/d) are not the same in several of the existing measurements, and as such, this makes the intercomparison between those measurements complicated without corrections for differences in secondary particle transport through differing amounts of target material. Therefore, this work aims to study the influence of the target geometry on the angular distributions of secondary particles. Cases with 100 and 230 MeV/amu 4He ions bombarding stopping water and iron targets with various dimensions were studied by using the transport model code PHITS (Particle and Heavy Ion Transport code System). With increasing target depth, the impact on the attenuation of secondary particles is more significant for lighter target mass and higher-energy projectiles at forward angles. Also, with deeper targets, more interactions occur between the secondary particles and the target nuclei, which results in more targetlike fragments at large and backward angles. With respect to the cross-sectional area of the stopping targets, the forward angular distributions are similar to the system with smaller cross-sectional area of the targets; however, charged particles are significantly attenuated at large angles, whereas no general rule was found for secondary neutrons at large and backward angles. These results indicate that in order to compare the angular distributions from various stopping target measurements, it will be necessary to utilize a radiation transport code to correct the differences caused by target geometry.