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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
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 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.
Shefali Saxena, Ayman I. Hawari
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 5 | May 2023 | Pages 667-676
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2148839
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this work, an investigation was performed to assess the feasibility of passive gamma-ray spectrometry using adaptive digital pulse processing for online interrogation of pebble bed reactor (PBR) fuel. This work incorporates the physics of the radiation emission phenomenon with advanced pulse processing techniques to develop a high-resolution gamma-spectrometry system capable of handling ultrahigh count rates in various applications of nuclear science and technology. Computational modeling was used to simulate the irradiation of PBR fuel and to design the adaptive digital pulse processing–based gamma-ray spectrometry system. Monte Carlo simulations were performed to study the gamma-ray spectra of the PBR fuel and to perform coupled photon-electron transport analysis to calculate the pulse-height spectrum of PBR fuel. A Monte Carlo computer routine was used to predict the effect of pulse pileup at high-count-rate conditions. This code utilizes the random interval distribution function based on Poisson statistics to simulate the pileup behavior. Combined with pileup logic, a recursive trapezoid filter with adaptive shaping parameters was implemented to simulate the pileup behavior of a digital gamma-ray spectrometry system. The adaptive shaping algorithm selects the rise time of the trapezoid shaping filter based on the separation between the input pulses for each incoming signal. The simulation results using the proposed adaptive digital pulse processing demonstrated that with the improved energy resolution, the burnup information can be more accurately determined on a pebble-by-pebble basis as compared to fixed shaping, and tasks related to in-core fuel management, safeguards, and waste management become feasible to perform efficiently and accurately.