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The mission of the Decommissioning and Environmental Sciences (DES) Division is to promote the development and use of those skills and technologies associated with the use of nuclear energy and the optimal management and stewardship of the environment, sustainable development, decommissioning, remediation, reutilization, and long-term surveillance and maintenance of nuclear-related installations, and sites. The target audience for this effort is the membership of the Division, the Society, and the public at large.
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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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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.
Luis Palomino, Mohamed S. El-Genk
Nuclear Technology | Volume 195 | Number 1 | July 2016 | Pages 1-14
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NT15-102
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Scalable LIquid Metal–cooled small Modular (SLIMM) reactor generates 10 to 100 MW(thermal) for extended periods without refueling. With the aid of an in-vessel chimney and a Na/Na helically coiled tubes heat exchanger (HEX) in the downcomer, natural circulation of in-vessel liquid sodium cools the SLIMM reactor core during nominal operation and after shutdown. With an unlikely malfunction of the Na/Na HEX, natural circulation of ambient air along the outer surface of the guard vessel wall maintains in-vessel natural circulation of liquid sodium and passively removes the decay heat after reactor shutdown. This paper performs three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics and thermal-hydraulic analyses to obtain preliminary estimates of the rate of decay heat removal by ambient air in case of a malfunction of the in-vessel Na/Na HEX and investigates the effect of using longitudinal metal fins along the guard vessel outer surface. The analyses calculate the contributions of natural convection and thermal radiation to the rate of decay heat removal by ambient air. For the same sodium temperatures in the reactor vessel downcomer as during steady-state nominal operation at 100 MW(thermal), the decay heat removal rate by ambient air without metal fins is ~1.0 MW(thermal), increasing by 26% to 1.26 MW(thermal) with metal fins. The contributions of natural convection and thermal radiation to the rate of decay heat removal are 58% and 42% without metal fins and 70% and 30% with metal fins, respectively. Extending the metal fins an additional 5 m and doubling the axial thermal conductivity increase the rate of the decay heat removal only slightly, to 1.28 MW(thermal).