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Advanced Nuclear Engineering Computational Laboratory
Director: Professor Jasmina Vujic

Berkeley Compact Toroid Experiment
Director: Professor Edward Morse

Nuclear Waste Research Laboratory
Directors: Professor Joonhong Ahn and Professor Paul L. Chambré

The Rotating Target Neutron Source (RTNS)
Director: Professor Edward Morse

Nuclear Materials Laboratory
Director: Professor Donald Olander

UC Thermal Hydraulics Laboratory
Director: Professor Per Peterson

Software Library

Advanced Nuclear Engineering Computational Laboratory
Director: Professor Jasmina Vujic

The Advanced Nuclear Engineering Computational Laboratory (ANECL) has maintained the tradition of excellence by providing easy access to modern computers and software for all Nuclear Engineering students, faculty, and staff. It is dedicated to both research and class work.

ANECL is continually growing and updating its hardware and software. Currently the lab consists of Sun UNIX workstations, PC's running Windows NT and Apple Power PC's (Macintosh). The UNIX machines consist of a mixture of Sparc 10's, a Sparc 20, Sparc 2's, and six Ultra Sparc 170's. Each machine except for the Sparc 2's, have 128 MB of RAM. One of the Sparc 10's named fission acts as the server for the department. With 16 GB of disk space, all user files and programs reside here. Allowing daily backups and ease of access to programs and files from any console. The Sparc 2's exist solely as consoles, while the Ultra Sparc 170's with Solaris 2.5.1 installed, function as consoles and perform most of the CPU intensive tasks. The six Ultra Sparcs may also run programs in parallel processing mode using PVM or MPI.

Also available is the developing "Millennium" cluster, which will consist of numerous parallel processing machines running SolarisX86 (UNIX). Currently our Department uses one machine running Solaris86, which has four Intel Pentium Pro 200Mhz CPU's, 256MB of RAM, and 14GB of storage space. Future machines are slated to have Pentium II 333Mhz CPU's and more memory and hard drive space. These machines are used for research and code development purposes only, and are configured to give maximum performance to run programs. Eventually there will be over 20 "nodes" or CPU's available on our machine to run programs, and later ability to run on other machines across campus. This is an evolving project made possible by grants from Intel, IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems, and soon should become one of the top 200 powerful computing resources in the world.

ANECL also supports a Microsoft Windows NT server and several Windows NT workstations in the lab and throughout the department. Roaming profiles, centrally located home directories and a growing list of software enables users to access their files from anywhere in the department and keep their desktop settings from machine to machine. The Apple Macintosh's function as stand-alone computers and are open to all.

Professor Jasmina Vujic is the Director of ANECL while Bill King, the systems administrator for the department, maintains the lab. Annie Kalish is responsible for the Nuclear Engineering Department's World Wide Web Pages. A hypertext based information database containing up-to-date information about the Department, faculty, undergraduate and graduate programs, facilities, areas of instruction and research, as well as research news and technical papers on fusion, nuclear materials, thermal hydraulics, computational neutronics, and ethics. The Internet address of the UCNBE Home Page is www.nuc.berkeley.edu. Our Home Page also includes on-line tutorials in basic and advanced UNIX and html skills, as well as on-line computer code manuals.

Word and data processing programs include Microsoft Office, Word Perfect, Frame Maker, and Lotus 123. Neutronics programs include ORNL Scale 4.3 criticality safety package and MCNP4B a particle transport Monte Carlo code. Programming Languages include GCC, C, C++, Pascal, Fortran77, and Fortran90.

One significant advantage of the ANECL is that the interconnectivity of the workstations allows us to run various parallel programming packages, such as PVM and MPI. These parallel software libraries allow a single program to be on a cluster of machines. This increases the processing power available, and decreases the amount of time that the code takes to run.

The ANECL facility is located on the first floor in Etcheverry Hall (1106A and B).

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Berkeley Compact Toroid Experiment
Director: Professor Edward Morse

The Berkeley Compact Toroid Experiment (BCTX) is an experimental plasma confinement device for study of controlled nuclear fusion. The device is a spheromak, which is a compact toroidal magnetically confined plasma. This device is being explored as an alternative to the more thoroughly studied tokamak device, which is the principal configuration being studied for the generation of fusion energy from a magnetically confined plasma.

The particular purpose of the BCTX experiment is to study the confinement properties of a spheromak plasma following the injection of a pulse of radio frequency (RF) heating. A twenty megawatt pulse at the device's lower hybrid resonance frequency is injected into the plasma by means of a wave guide antenna. The response of the plasma to this pulse is studied using an array of plasma diagnostic methods including laser interferometry, laser Thomson scattering, spectroscopy of impurity lines, and magnetic probes. These diagnostics are being used to determine the plasma's energy confinement time. Recent studies have suggested that the spheromak plasma may possess a core plasma with adequate heat confinement for consideration of the spheromak concept for power-producing fusion reactors. Should the physics performance of the spheromak prove to be sufficient for ignition-grade fusion devices, it is a desirable alternative to the tokamak based upon the cost to build reactor-grade units. BCTX is located in room 1140 Etcheverry Hall.

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Nuclear Waste Research Laboratory
Directors: Professors Joonhong Ahn and Paul L. Chambré

The nuclear waste research laboratory at UC Berkeley focuses on nuclear wastes from commercial utilization of nuclear power. The research interest can be divided into two areas. 1. Mechanisms of waste isolation by geologic disposal. We are developing performance assessment models for geologic disposal at different levels of scale; from one waste canister to the entire repository, and to the surrounding region around the repository. Radionuclide transport is the major subject for study, because risk may arise due to redistribution of radionuclides disposed of in the repository over a long time period. 2. Technologies for waste reduction, resulting in significantly smaller risk from nuclear energy utilization. The spent nuclear fuel from current light-water reactors (LWRs) still contains significant amount of fissile materials. There is a possibility of reducing risk arising from geologic disposal by recovering and utilizing actinides as energy sources and transmuting long-lived fission products into short-lived species. The results of the study are important to investigate impacts of a next-generation nuclear power system on Asia/Pacific region. In order for those newly-emerging countries in this region to adopt nuclear energy, nuclear power systems must satisfy conditions such as ease of utilization, competitive cost, and acceptable environmental risk. 6 Pentium II or III-based PCs, a Sparc 20 workstation, two Macintosh computers, a laser printer, and a scanner form the intranet for the Nuclear Waste Research Lab for analyses and computer-code development, including:

1. groundwater flow models in heterogeneous fracture networks in geologic formations,
2. radionuclide transport models through engineered barriers of a geologic repository and through hosting geologic formations,
3. integrated models for repository performance assessment using object-oriented approach and parallel computing, using PVM, and
4. mass flow models of radioactive materials in a nuclear fuel cycle.

The lab is located in room 4126B of Etcheverry Hall.

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The Rotating Target Neutron Source (RTNS)
Director: Professor Edward Morse

RTNS experiment is a fusion neutron source consisting of a 400 kilovolt electrostatic accelerator with a deuteron beam and a rotating tritium target. The neutrons generated are 14 MeV neutrons of the same nuclear origin as those found in fusion devices. The production rate of neutrons from this machine is in the 1012 neutrons per second range.

The target-end of the RTNS, where the neutrons are generated, is enclosed within a massive concrete structure The facility is designed so that sample materials can be irradiated with a fast-neutron spectrum rich in primary 14-MeV neutrons. This machine serves as a general irradiation facility for nuclear materials and nuclear physics experiments.

The RTNS machine has currently been used in various technical studies in connection with the National Ignition Facility (NIF) project at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. These studies include neutron activation studies of structural materials, neutron-induced degradation of target chamber components, and nuclear cross section measurements of interest in the NIF experimental program. The machine has also been used as a teaching tool in the course Nuclear Engineering 104B, where the students use it in a laboratory experiment to demonstrate the techniques used to evaluate the response of materials to irradiation with fusion neutrons.

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Nuclear Materials Laboratory
Director: Professor Donald Olander

The mission of the laboratory for nuclear materials is the investigation of the primarily-chemical behavior of the fuel element materials uranium dioxide and zirconium in the high-temperature, corrosive environment of a light-water reactor. The facility for studying hydriding of cladding and fuel oxidation consists of high-pressure microbalances capable of continuously measuring weight changes of specimens due to chemical reactions at pressures of 70 atm in mixed hydrogen-steam gases.

In another project, a concept utilizing a liquid metal rather than helium in the fuel-cladding gap of light-water reactor fuel elements is under investigation.

Materials problems encountered in the nuclear fuel cycle are also investigated in this laboratory in conjunction with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Among these projects is an investigation of the volatility of the actinide elements during high-temperature remediation of wastes containing both radioactive and hazardous materials. In another project, the potential of ignition of hot metallic uranium in air is investigated experimentally.

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UC Thermal Hydraulics Laboratory Director: Professor Per Peterson

The U.C. Berkeley Thermal Hydraulics Laboratory, under the guidance of Professor Per F. Peterson, performs extensive experimental and analytical research related to heat and mass transport in fission and fusion power systems.

The Thermal Hydraulics Group and the Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE) Thick Liquid Protection Experiments are located in Etcheverry Hall on the U.C. Berkeley campus. The experimental facilities are located both on the fourth floor, with 1100 square feet of experimental and 600 square feet of student office space, and on the first floor with a larger area of crane-serviced high-bay space. The Nuclear Engineering Department provides access to machine-shop, technical, and clerical support services. The campus compressed air, steam and cooling tower systems have provide high air, steam and cooling water flow rates for larger-scale condensation and large-enclosure mixing experiments.

The laboratory maintains extensive instrumentation for data acquisition, including PC and Macintosh-based systems for multi-channel (>100) temperature and pressure monitoring and separate high-speed pressure data acquisition for shock-tube experiments. Flow visualization equipment includes video equipment with frame-capture ability for image processing. Data reduction is performed on several Macintosh and PC computers.

The Group utilizes LLNL supercomputer facilities, as well as a Sun work stations equipped with RELAP-5. The group also maintains extensive software for multi-dimensional compressible flow calculations. Macintosh computers with video acquisition cards are used for image processing, animation of numerical computation results, and graphics output.

A sample of ongoing experimental work includes experiments for measuring noncondensable gas distributions under condensation in vertical tubes, to quantify degradation effects due to noncondensables. Separate experiments currently examine high-velocity stationary and oscillating water jets in vacuum conditions, for application to inertial fusion energy target chamber shielding. Additional experiments are modeling larger-scale transient mixing processes in high-level radioactive waste tanks, reactor containments, and other large volumes. These experiments complement ongoing code development and numerical analysis.

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