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Decommissioning & Environmental Sciences
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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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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Proving DRACO will deliver
The United States is now closer than it has been in over five decades to launching the first nuclear thermal rocket into space, thanks to DRACO—the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Orbit.
Yafen Liu, Rui Yan, Yang Zou, Xuzhong Kang, Ruimin Ji, Bo Zhou, Shihe Yu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 204 | Number 2 | November 2018 | Pages 203-212
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1474703
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Zero-power experiments are very important parts in design verification for all reactor types. In the 1970s, in China, at the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics (then, Shanghai Institute of Nuclear Research), a Critical Experiment Device (cold) was established for research on the physics characteristics of the molten salt reactor (MSR), and a series of zero-power experiments was successfully performed; related experimental results were obtained later. The device consisted mainly of graphite moderator and powdered BeF2 – UF4 / ThF4 fuel and could achieve a maximum power of 200 W. The current work is focused on criticality properties with various core configurations and fuel arrangements of this device and the worths of the cadmium rods used in the device. Evaluations on the agreement of calculation results with experimental data showed good results. Discrepancies between the calculation results and the experimental data might be primarily caused by the simulated outermost fuel element positions not being exactly the same as the experimental arrangements and the unmodeled instruments used in the experiments. The findings in this work can be considered a step of verification of simulation methods and calculations for a cold MSR.