Argonne National Laboratory

Nuclear Safety

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 safety.

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  • Tanju Sofu

    Tanju Sofu is senior leadership team member of DOE’s Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling & Simulation (NEAMS) program.

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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

  • Warheads to Plowshares

    There’s a decent chance you’re reading this by lights that are powered by the remains of Soviet-era nuclear weapons.
    Greg Martin reads and Robert Elwood records the serial number of a vessel containing low-enriched uranium hexafluoride.