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Division Spotlight
Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2025
Nuclear Technology
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May 2025
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.
Robert Nshimirimana, Ajith Abraham, Gawie Nothnagel, Andries Engelbrecht
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 1 | January 2021 | Pages 147-166
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1740562
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A manual approach to radiography process optimization is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process. Therefore, a virtual environment in which all of the processes of optimization for a desired radiography experiment or setup are conducted is highly desirable. Such an environment should be able to provide the capability to arrive at radiographic scanning parameters that are optimized to within preset criteria for design purposes. In this paper, a simplified approach toward achieving this is described, and calculated radiography results are benchmarked against experiments. A ray-tracing technique combined with the exponential law of attenuation was used to provide the primary function of such a virtual environment, which is the modeling of the radiography system. Radiography quality parameters such as contrast, penetration, unsharpness, and resolution were calculated using predefined definitions and fed directly into a particle swarm optimization routine that searched for the best radiography design parameters in an iterative feedback loop between the simulator and the optimizer modules. The aim of this paper is to show that a rather simple radiography simulation approach can already provide sufficient data for system design optimization purposes without the need to develop or utilize a comprehensive, competitive radiography simulator. The simplified approach provides a direct “uncomplicated” virtual environment for basic radiography training and basic experimental planning.