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Division Spotlight
Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
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.
Karen Colins, Yu Liu, Liqian Li, Kiranpreet Birdee
Nuclear Technology | Volume 201 | Number 2 | February 2018 | Pages 113-121
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1411718
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Proximate to nuclear power plant severe accidents, sustained high levels of gamma radiative flux are perilous not only to human health but also to the functionality of conventional radiation-monitoring devices. Effective accident mitigation presents a significant challenge because the gamma radiation adversely affects the means by which it is measured. Deployments of large numbers of radiation-hardened monitoring devices, required to meet the demands of adequate system reliability and the large spatiotemporal scales associated with such accidents, are expected to be prohibitively expensive. As an affordable alternative, this paper proposes usage of a wireless sensor network (WSN) built with unshielded low-cost integrated circuits (ICs) acting as consumable proportional sensors of gamma radiation dose. Adverse responses of ICs to damaging gamma radiation dose can be characterized statistically, in controlled laboratory experiments. In subsequent field application, responses of individual ICs, transmitted over a WSN to a remote computer, can be translated into local dose measurements using correlations obtained via the laboratory characterization. Experiments to characterize adverse response to radiation dose were performed on multiple complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor–based electrically erasable programmable read-only memory devices in a Gammacell 220 Cobalt-60 Irradiation Unit (60Co source) at the Canadian Nuclear Laboratories. Details of the experiments, data analyses, and a small-scale prototype WSN are discussed in this paper. Outcomes of the experiments a nd analysis support the concept of using low-cost consumable ICs in a WSN to measure high levels of gamma radiation dose associated with nuclear power plant severe accidents.