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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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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.
Wuseung You, Ser Gi Hong
Nuclear Technology | Volume 194 | Number 2 | May 2016 | Pages 217-232
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NT15-85
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this work, 400-MW(electric) sodium-cooled fast reactor cores using thorium- and uranium-based metallic fuels for high burning rates of light water reactor spent-fuel transuranics (TRUs) are neutronically designed and analyzed based on equilibrium cycles with a focus on consistent comparative analysis of the differences in performance between thorium- and uranium-based fueled cores. Axial uranium and thorium blankets are introduced in thorium- and uranium-based driver fueled burner cores to improve TRU burning rates without considerable increases of burnup reactivity swing. For this core configuration, it was shown that cores using thorium and depleted uranium blankets can be designed to have a high TRU burning rate, a low sodium void reactivity (SVR) worth, and a low burnup reactivity swing. In particular, the use of uranium or thorium blankets without recycling in the thorium-based driver fueled cores led to significant reductions of burnup reactivity swing with considerable increases of the TRU burning rate and small increases of SVR. In addition, the core configuration having central nonfuel regions was considered to show the effects of the thorium-based driver metallic fuel versus the uranium-based metallic fuel coupled with moderator rods. The core configuration with thorium-based fuel led to a negative SVR without moderator rods, and the use of moderator rods further improved the Doppler coefficient and reduced SVR. Also, a decomposition analysis of SVR was performed to better understand the differences in the contributing factors between the uranium- and thorium-based fueled cores, and a quasi-static reactivity balance analysis was performed to show the inherent safety of the cores in terms of self-controllability.