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Division Spotlight
Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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
Steam is a sign of cooling system function . . . at ITER
Steam from one of ITER’s ten induced-draft cooling cells offers visual confirmation of a successful cooling system test, the ITER organization announced April 30. ITER’s cooling system features 60 kilometers of piping with pumps, filters, and heat exchangers that can pull water through at up to 14 cubic meters per second. Once fully operational, two cooling loops—one to remove the heat generated by the plasma in the ITER tokamak and one for its supporting infrastructure—will be capable of extracting up to 1,200 MW of heat.
Cihang Lu, Zeyun Wu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 10 | October 2022 | Pages 1577-1590
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2049966
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Equilibrium state generation for the pebble bed reactor (PBR) is challenging due to the need to simultaneously account for both pebble movement and changes in fuel compositions. Multigroup diffusion codes have been historically employed to generate the equilibrium state and perform conventional neutronics calculations for PBRs, while neutron cross-section generation has been challenging due to the double heterogeneity of PBRs. Thanks to the capability to treat the double heterogeneity naturally, continuous-energy Monte Carlo (MC) methods are more suitable for detailed PBR analysis, but at the cost of significantly higher computing power.
This paper presents a new Methodology to Efficiently Estimate the Equilibrium State of a PBR (MEEES-PBR) to generate equilibrium-state MC models for PBRs at lower computational expense. The MEEES-PBR is expected to contribute to the future development of PBR designs by accelerating the efforts in core designs and parametric studies. The theory of the MEEES-PBR is introduced in detail in this paper, and the procedure is demonstrated via an example application to the 165-MW(thermal) Xe-100 design. The computational cost and the accuracy of the MEEES-PBR are discussed to prove its viability.