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Division Spotlight
Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
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.
Takumi Uezono, Toru Motoya, Katsunobu Natori, Satoshi Nishikawa, Keisuke Yamamoto, Tomokazu Takahashi, Shohei Nakamura, Goro Suzuki (Hitachi)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 645-652
We propose a design and verification process for a hardware-resource-efficient FPGA-based functional safety controller. In order to reduce the hardware resources consumed by the NPP application, we developed a resource-sharing calculation architecture on the FPGA. Our designed FPGA-based controller utilizing our developed architecture is hard-wired, but can operate another function by replacing contents in the calculation control memory. Thus, our developed controller achieves both safety and flexibility. In addition, a data conversion tool from NPP application to calculation control data for our developed architecture is also developed. In the verification step, output data from our developed tool is verified by a process where that calculation control data is reversely-converted to the NPP application and checked whether it is equivalent with the original NPP application by the logical equivalence verification method. Our verification process makes it possible to apply formal verification method and achieve the SIL 4 compliant verification process for the FPGA-based controller for Class 1 I&C systems . Our proposed design and verification process was assessed by TÜV Rheinland and accepted as SIL 4 compliant.