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Division Spotlight
Nuclear Installations Safety
Devoted specifically to the safety of nuclear installations and the health and safety of the public, this division seeks a better understanding of the role of safety in the design, construction and operation of nuclear installation facilities. The division also promotes engineering and scientific technology advancement associated with the safety of such facilities.
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-Baptiste Droin, Vincent Pascal, Paul Gauthe, Frédéric Bertrand, Gédéon Mauger (CEA)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 128-136
The present paper is dedicated to preliminary studies of the transient behavior of the ASTRID (Advanced Sodium Technological Reactor for Industrial Demonstration) demonstrator developed in France by CEA and its industrial partners. ASTRID is foreseen to demonstrate the progress made in Sodium Fast Reactor (SFR) technologies at an industrial scale by qualifying innovative options, some of which still remain open in the areas requiring improvements, especially safety and operability. Among the innovative options, a gas Power Conversion System (PCS) based on the Brayton thermodynamical cycle is currently considered. The main objective of such a PCS consists in physically avoiding the possibility of a sodium/water reaction with the secondary circuit.
To assess the transient behavior of such a PCS when facing incident/accident sequences, previous calculations were carried out using the CATHARE 2 thermal-hydraulics code, which considers by default the working gas as an ideal gas in its Equations Of States (EOS). However, this approximation is no longer valid for the high pressure levels of this Brayton cycle. This paper thus describes new calculations performed considering real gas EOS that are now available in CATHARE 3. The simulation of the nominal PCS working point is shown to be much more accurate than in previous CATHARE 2 calculations as the discrepancy regarding the theoretical working point is less than 1°C for the gas temperature and less than 1 % for all the components power levels (compressors, heat exchangers and turbines). The impact of this new real gas hypothesis in CATHARE 3 on an unprotected transient simulation has also been investigated on a loss of power supply case. For short time scales, the impact of such an hypothesis is demonstrated to be very low. However, an improvement of the heat extraction with the real gas option should enhance the natural convection in the primary circuit to the longer term.