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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
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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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.
Dan G. Cacuci, Ruixian Fang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 198 | Number 2 | May 2017 | Pages 85-131
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1294429
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For counter-flow mechanical draft cooling towers, the air in the fill can reach the point of saturation before leaving the fill section. The heat and mass transfer to the saturated air by evaporative cooling inside the fill are modeled with some assumptions and with over 50 parameters for boundary conditions, cooling tower geometries, heat and mass transfer correlations, water and air thermal properties, etc. Because of the parameter uncertainties and modeling assumptions, the accuracy and reliability of the cooling tower model need to be evaluated by quantifying the uncertainties associated with the model output. First, sensitivities of the model output with respect to all the model parameters need to be analyzed. Based on the cooling tower model, this work developed adjoint sensitivity models for the saturated case to compute efficiently and exactly the sensitivities of the model responses to all model parameters by applying the general adjoint sensitivity analysis methodology for nonlinear systems. The solution of the adjoint sensitivity models are independently verified. With the sensitivities known, the model parameters can be ranked in their importance for contributing to response uncertainties. The propagation of the uncertainties in the model parameters to the uncertainties in the model outputs can be evaluated. By further applying the predictive modeling for coupled multiphysics systems methodology, the cooling tower model for the saturated case can be improved by reducing the model prediction uncertainties through assimilation of experimental measurements and calibration of model parameters.