Argonne National Laboratory

Nuclear Engineering

Argonne maintains a wide-ranging science and technology portfolio that seeks to address complex challenges in interdisciplinary and innovative ways. Below is a list of all articles, highlights, profiles, projects, and organizations related specifically to nuclear engineering.

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  • Candido Pereira

    Candido Pereira is a principal chemical engineer and manages the Process Simulation and Safeguards group within Argonne’s Chemical & Fuel Cycle Technologies Division.

  • Abdellatif M. Yacout

    Abdellatif Yacout is a senior nuclear engineer and manages the Fuel Development and Qualification department within Argonne’s Chemical and Fuel Cycle Technologies division.

  • Russ Nietert

    Russ Nietert is a Principal Nuclear Engineer. He is the nuclear exports Team Leader in the Strategic Security Sciences Division’s Nuclear/Radiological Proliferation Analysis and Modeling Group.

  • Temitope A. Taiwo

    Temitope Taiwo is the Director of Argonne’s Nuclear Science and Engineering Division.

  • Roger N. Blomquist

    Roger serves on the Nuclear Science & Engineering Division Outreach Committee, which responds to public inquiries, provides speakers for civic groups, and interfaces with university nuclear engineering departments.
  • Simulation tool that can perform deterministic transient safety analysis of anticipated operational events, as well as design-basis and beyond-design-basis accidents for advanced nuclear reactors
    Intellectual Property Available to License

    Argonne’s SAS4A/SASSYS-1 safety analysis code system is a simulation tool that can perform deterministic transient safety analysis of anticipated operational events, as well as design-basis and beyond-design-basis accidents for advanced nuclear reactors. The original code development was for sodium-cooled fast reactors, and sodium boiling can be modeled. However, basic core thermal-hydraulics and systems analysis features are applicable to other liquid-metal cooled reactor concepts.

    Applications

    • Safety analysis of fast reactors
    • Simulations for operational, design-basis and beyond-design-basis events
    • Passive heat removal and natural circulation flow predictions
    • Severe accident modeling with sodium boiling, fuel melting and pin failure

    Features

    The current version (version 5) features:

    • Detailed code manual
    • Single-pin assembly models for rapid evaluation of transients
    • Detailed thermal-hydraulic sub-channel models for subassembly pin bundles
    • Support for three-dimensional visualization of sub-channel temperatures
    • Support for liquid-metal coolants such as sodium, NaK, lead and LBE, as well as other single-phase coolants
    • Full-plant coolant system models to simulate passive heat removal and natural shutdown
    • Oxide fuel models for fuel melting, in-pin motion, pin failure, and ex-pin fuel dispersal and freezing
    • Metal fuel models for fuel-clad eutectic formation and cladding failure
    • High-fidelity decay heat models
    • Built-in support for ANS standard decay heat properties
    • Built-in support for alternative coolants in decay heat removal loops
    • Support for line-based comments in input files
    • Support for an unlimited number of time steps
    • Support for coupling to third-party computational fluid dynamics tools (such as STAR-CCM+) for representing thermal stratification in large volumes
    • Support for coupling to DIF3D-K for reactor spatial kinetics

    Technical Details/Requirements

    • Executable versions are available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows
    • Source code is compliant with Fortran 90/95 free-formatted source format and can be compiled on a variety of operating systems including Unix, Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. A standards-compliant Fortran compiler is required.
  • No other fast spectrum multigroup generation tool matches the demonstrated accuracy of MC2-3
    Intellectual Property Available to License

    It generates broad-group, cell-average microscopic cross sections from ENDF/B basic nuclear data.

    MC2-3 handles the complicated resonance self-shielding in fast spectrum systems by directly accounting for the resonance interactions in detail and performing calculations (2082 ultrafine group + 400,000 hyperfine group) on conventional lattice cells or simplified R-Z core models. The resulting microscopic cross sections are used for fast reactor design and analysis calculations.

    Applications

    • Nuclear fast reactor simulations and analysis

    Features

    • Code library includes almost all isotopes of the ENDF/B-VII data.
    • Resolved resonance self-shielding using the numerical integration of pointwise cross sections based on the narrow resonance approximation
    • Unresolved resonance self-shielding using the generalized integral method with the increased number of energy grids
    • Anisotropic inelastic scattering
    • 1-Dimensional (1-D) transport calculation using ultrafine or hyperfine groups
    • Improved equivalence theory for the 1D heterogeneity effect in resonance self-shielding
    • Efficient algorithm for solving the hyperfine group transport equation
    • Option to use 2-D transport solutions (TWODANT) for group condensation
    • Fortran 90/95 memory structure
    • Keyword-based input system and built-in data conversion capability

    Technical Details/Requirements

    Developed using the Compaq Visual Fortran on the Microsoft Windows operating system (OS), the MC2-3 code can be installed and executed on the Windows, Macintosh, Unix and Linux OS environments. The memory requirements depend upon the problem. The current version requires more than 1G byte of memory. The memory management system in the current version does not use scratch files to save memory. Thus, more than 4G byte of memory may be required for large problems with many isotopes, hyperfine groups, and/or one-dimensional geometry. A Fortran compiler is required to compile the included source code. Minor changes may be required for code compilation.

    The software is written in Fortran 90/95 and can be run on a variety of operating systems including Unix, Linux, Mac OS and Windows. The software includes comments in the source code and the method/user/programmer manual with several examples. An engineer with neutronics experience can learn to run the code in anywhere from a day to a week.

  • A technology to make nuclear and radiological facilities safer by better monitoring both plant conditions as well as the most sensitive materials onsite
    Intellectual Property Available to License

    The patent-pending system, called ARG-US Remote Area Modular Monitoring, or RAMM, uses hig-tech sensors paired with redundant, self-healing communications platforms that can work even in the most challenging conditions.

    The work is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Environmental Management, and Packaging Certification Program.

    Reference: 
    SF-08-046(multiple); SF-17-016