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Division Spotlight
Materials Science & Technology
The objectives of MSTD are: promote the advancement of materials science in Nuclear Science Technology; support the multidisciplines which constitute it; encourage research by providing a forum for the presentation, exchange, and documentation of relevant information; promote the interaction and communication among its members; and recognize and reward its members for significant contributions to the field of materials science in nuclear technology.
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.
Jean-Christophe Lecoy, Jean-Yves Sauvage, Camille Charignon
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 12 | December 2019 | Pages 1567-1577
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1580528
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Combined approaches are now applied in safety analyses of design-basis accidents. They consist of using best-estimate models in the computer codes together with their estimated uncertainties, and require the most unfavorable initial and boundary conditions (IBCs) to be found with respect to the plant operating conditions. This implies determining first the worst-case scenarios, then predicting the figures of merit (FOMs) that must fulfill safety criteria. Such scenarios can be identified by sensitivity studies on IBCs resulting in an input vector of fixed values to realize a deterministic bounding calculation. However, it is a difficult and time-consuming iterative task especially for complex transients with interactions between parameters. Alternatively, the RIPS (Reduction of the Interval of variation of the Parameters of the Scenario) method has been developed in a best-estimate plus uncertainty approach to find the worst IBCs as a set of reduced ranges of variation of the related inputs, rather than by a vector of discrete values. It defines a critical zone for which the FOM is maximized (or minimized). To this end the RIPS method provides quantitative and graphical outcomes enabling identification of the detrimental (or favorable) ranges of variation of the preponderant IBC parameters. This is done through a statistical analysis of a large set of calculations in which all the input parameters and code model uncertainties are randomly sampled. The RIPS method analyzes the higher (or lower) quantiles of the FOM cumulative density function and determines for each input parameter the critical zone within its variation interval, i.e., where it is the most influential. Correlations between parameters are also detected. This paper describes the RIPS method and demonstrates with several examples its ability to adequately identify the critical zone of the IBC configuration space.