About this Research Topic

Background

Advanced nuclear reactor designs will generally be a significant departure from low enriched uranium light water reactor (LWR) designs currently operated worldwide. Such advanced designs include but are not limited to TRISO-fueled high-temperature gas reactors, heat-pipe cooled micro-reactors, fluoride salt cooled high-temperature reactors, molten salt reactors, lead-cooled fast reactors, nuclear thermal propulsion concepts, and would include the current LWR fleet with advanced fuel and clad types. This Research Topic will solicit manuscripts describing experiments that can be used as benchmark for advanced reactor and fuel design analysis, including historical data, work in progress or addressing needs for future measurement needs. Papers will also be encouraged relative to experimental reactors currently being designed and constructed, along with experiments being performed or planned at research test facilities.

Modeling and simulation of advanced reactors will be necessary for regulators to be able to review and approve license requests. However, regulators also require that modeling approaches be validated against relevant experimental measurement data. This solicitation seeks manuscripts on data relevant for advanced reactor systems that will support validation of reactor system analysis methods. This will include, but is not limited to, criticality, reactor physics, shielding, material performance and multi-physics data and development of benchmarks based on those data. This is not focused on any specific advanced reactor design. However, it generally excludes data for light water reactors unless such data is collected for the unique needs of a light-water based advanced reactor (such as accident tolerant fuels or enrichment beyond 5%) or for serving as surrogates for understanding the underlying physics for cases when experiments are not available (e.g., very high burnup fuels). Ultimately this publication will provide information that is not generally available in the literature to support advanced reactor design and licensing.

We are primarily interested in manuscripts that describe measurements and benchmark-quality measurement data that can be used to validate computational methods used in the analysis and design of advanced reactor technologies. However, we would welcome contributions that highlight the potential value of historical data for advanced reactor applications, and papers that highlight specific needs for experimental data. Finally, papers that describe verification, validation and uncertainty quantification applications for advanced reactors are solicited. Each paper should seek to educate the general community with respect to data and methods to validate computational methods as applied for next generation advanced reactor concepts. We would also welcome papers on the known or expected challenges in validation with respect to advanced fuel types and reactor designs to set the stage for the remainder of the papers in the issue.

Keywords: Benchmark, Advanced Reactor, Criticality, Reactor Physics, Multi-Physics, Shielding, Thermal-Hydraulics

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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