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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 217 records · Page 12
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2026

Electric-field-assisted-sintering of rare-earth oxide dispersion strengthened Fe-Cr-Mo alloys

Oxide dispersion-strengthened (ODS) alloys are widely recognized for their exceptional high-temperature strength, creep resistance, and radiation tolerance, making them indispensable for advanced nuclear reactors, aerospace, and energy systems. Achieving a fine and stable dispersion of oxide nanoparticles is critical, as these particles act as strong barriers to dislocation motion and effective sinks for irradiation-induced defects, ensuring structural integrity under extreme conditions. Here, in this study, Fe–Cr–Mo-based ODS alloys were fabricated via mechanical alloying and consolidated using electric-field-assisted sintering (EFAS) with additions of Y 2 O 3 , La 2 O 3 , and CeO 2 . EFAS processing produced ultrafine-grained microstructures (average grain size <1 μm) with uniformly distributed oxide clusters (2–4 nm). Atom probe tomography revealed that La 2 O 3 -containing alloys exhibited the highest nanoparticle number density, resulting in superior tensile strength compared to yttria- and ceria-bearing counterparts. The combined effect of grain refinement and rare-earth oxide dispersion significantly enhanced mechanical performance, demonstrating the potential of EFAS for developing high-strength ferritic alloys for demanding environments such as nuclear systems.

36 - MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2021

ECAR-6585 MARVEL Core Support Structure Analysis: Project #33526

Idaho National Laboratory (INL) is developing a small microreactor to produce electrical power utilizing a small nuclear core and stirling engines for power output under the Microreactor Application Research Validation and Evaluation (MARVEL) program. The MARVEL Reactor (Figure 1) will be installed in the Transient Reactor Test (TREAT) Facility. Walsh Engineering Services, PC (WES) has contracted with the INL to detail the final design. There are six main systems in the MARVEL, one of which is the Fuel and Core System (FCS). The FCS contains a subsystem–the Core Support Structures Subsystem (CSS)–that supports and orients each of the 36 nuclear fuel pins in the MARVEL Reactor System. The FCS (apart from the fixed Beryllium Oxide radial reflectors) is shown in light green and is depicted in more detail in Figure 1 and Figure 2. The main subject of this analysis is the lower grid plate, which is the principal item in the CSS which supports the fuel, see Figure 3. Additionally, the upper grid plate thermal expansion of the upper grid plate is presented in Appendix A.

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Moltensaltpropnet

MoltenSaltPropnet is a physics-informed machine learning framework that aims to predict the thermophysical properties of molten fluoride and chloride salt mixtures, which are crucial for the design and safety of Generation IV molten salt reactors. The code processes data from the Molten-Salt Thermal Properties Database (MSTDB-TP) and the Janz compendium, converting critically evaluated correlations into fast, differentiable surrogate models for density, viscosity, thermal conductivity, and heat capacity across 448 distinct salt systems. The implementation consists of several key components: 1. Data Curation: The code parses and cleans the raw data, normalizing elemental mole fractions and extracting relevant regression coefficients for various thermophysical properties. 2. Feature Engineering: It generates fixed-length numerical descriptors that encapsulate the composition and temperature, incorporating polynomial interaction terms and dimensionality-reduction techniques to optimize model performance. 3. Coefficient Learning: Four different machine learning architectures are employed: a deep residual network (ResNet), a Kolmogorov–Arnold network (KAN), a sparsity-inducing neural network (SNN), and classical regression models. Each model learns to predict coefficients that define the temperature-dependent correlations for the thermophysical properties. 4. Property Reconstruction: The predicted coefficients are used to compute temperature-dependent property values, ensuring positivity and monotonic trends through a composite loss function that enforces physical constraints. 5. User Interface: An open-source web application enables users to filter the database, train task-specific models, and visualize the results, allowing for rapid exploration of candidate salt mixtures. MoltenSaltPropnet bridges the gap between limited experimental data and high-fidelity reactor simulations, providing a powerful tool for researchers in the field of molten salt reactors and advanced nuclear energy systems.

Retamales, Mauricio Eduardo Tano [Idaho National L↗
DOE OSTI2021

Markets and Economic Requirements for Fission Batteries and Other Nuclear Systems

Fission Batteries (FBs) are nuclear reactors defined by five characteristics which enable large-scale deployment: cost competitive, standardized sizes for economic mass production, easy installation and removal, secure and safe unattended operation with high reliability. FBs are not defined by technology or power level. Technical and market considerations suggest that most FBs will produce 20 to 30 MWt. This proceedings reports on the outcomes of two workshops that were held in January 2021 to better define markets and economic challenges for FBs. Three major markets were identified. The largest market is the industrial and commercial heat market. There are about 4000 industrial users (excluding utilities) that require more than one megawatt of heat. The number of customers versus size of heat demand was determined. In a low-carbon world there is the potential for many additional customers—including expanded biofuels production and district heat. The second market is for non-grid electricity. This includes co-generation plants that produce heat and electricity for a single customer. The third market is the maritime market with ~100,000 ships worldwide. In the United States, natural gas is the low-cost energy option today and will remain so unless constraints or taxes impact its use. If restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions, the FB competition includes natural gas with carbon capture, biofuels, hydrogen and grid electricity. Natural gas with carbon capture is not economically viable on a small scale. Biofuels may be expensive but may be the economically preferred option for locations with small energy demands of a few megawatts. Hydrogen is a potential competitor with many of the characteristics of natural gas. Grid electricity is not a competitive source of heat. For FBs to be economically competitive, the price of delivered heat must be $20-50/MWh ($6-15/million BTU). The economically competitive range for non-grid electricity is estimated at $70-100/MWh. These electricity prices are competitive with the retail prices of electricity in many parts of the United States for the customer. FBs are not expected to be competitive selling wholesale electricity to the grid. To achieve the aforementioned cost targets for heat and electricity markets, FB designers must (1) maximize the power output within the constraints of a FB (e.g., truck transportability, passive decay heat removal), (2) drastically reduce the size of onsite staff, (3) adopt core designs with low fuel costs (enrichment and fabrication), and (4) develop a system design that is efficiently manufactured in factories. The business case depends upon more than being just a replacement for natural gas. The largest incentives for adoption of FBs is where they create new markets and new sources of revenue. An example is the paper and pulp industry that burns biomass wastes to provide heat and electricity to make paper. An external heat source could meet the demand for heat and electricity by the paper process and enable converting waste biomass into liquid biofuels rather than burning to provide heat. Other markets, such as data centers, are driven by special energy requirements such as extreme reliability. Most customers are not in the energy business but need heat and electricity to produce a product—a manufactured good, education, retail sales (shopping malls), marine transport or some other product. As a consequence, there will be large incentives to lease rather than own FBs. Leasing avoids the regulatory challenges that remain with the owner of the FB. Leasing creates large incentives for FP standardization of sizes and transportability to maintain the value of the FB at the end of the lease—similar to the leasing of jet engines and aircraft. The economic constraints combined with technical constraints suggest competitive FBs will likely have outputs exceeding 10 MWt. There appear to be little incentives for very long-lived reactor cores because such machines require much larger inventories of fuel. Maintenance requirements and the options to provide technology updates may favor shorter lifetimes (~5 years). The assessment is that there is the potential for FBs to be economically viable and play a major role in global decarbonization in three markets: heat, non-grid electricity and maritime applications.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗
DOE OSTI2026

Performing Numerical Analysis of Cybersecurity Options Using Dynamic Risk Analysis Tool EMRALD

Cyberattacks can have many different attack paths, durations, and goals. There are also many different mitigation options involving hardware, software, and/or humans. Considering a cyber threat should involve defense-in-depth methods and a quantitative or numerical evaluation of overall effectiveness against dynamic, time-dependent attacks to make cost and risk-informed decisions. Typical cyberattack modeling methods only provide a qualitative evaluation. The main areas of cybersecurity are confidentiality, integrity, and availability. For companies with cyber-physical systems such as advanced nuclear reactors, cyber-related safety is a requirement set by North American Electric Reliability and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They are also concerned about availability or reliability as a business case. As cyber threats are evolving to a business-for-hire structure, more attacks may focus on disrupting business success and reliability, causing financial and economic stability risk. Companies want to know business reliability and recovery from those threats, and that requires modeling physical behavior of the targets. Dynamic-state-based and Markov-based modeling provides a method for better cyber scenario modeling with different tools having issues such as state-base explosion. Dynamic modeling enables time and conditional features not found in other numerical evaluation methods. EMRALD (Event Modeling Risk Assessment using Lined Diagrams) is a dynamic risk analysis modeling and simulation tool and has features that reduce modeling issues. It has been used to model different time-dependent events including plant behavior and operator procedures. As a general modeling tool, EMRALD can also be used to model cyberattack scenarios with varying mitigation options and quantify effectiveness, producing numerical data for risk-informed decisions. This paper uses EMRALD to demonstrate that dynamic numerical risk analysis can be used for cyber threat modeling to provide insights for design decision-making and optimize defense strategies. Keywords: cyber modeling; cyber-physical systems; numerical cyber modeling

97 - MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2025

Uncertainty estimation of bifurcated solutions in the Rayleigh–Bénard problem for advanced nuclear reactors applications

Multiphysics models of nuclear reactors frequently comprise nonlinear systems of equations. The nonlinear nature of these models could lead to solution bifurcations, where a small change in a certain parameter, e.g., the thermophysical properties of the coolant, can lead to a sudden change in the system’s behavior. At the point in parameter space where this happens, called a critical point, the Jacobian matrix of the model’s nonlinear operator becomes singular potentially permitting multiple solutions to coexist. In this paper, we perform uncertainty estimation (UE) in a parameter range that includes bifurcated solutions within the context of Rayleigh–Bénard problem. We perform this analysis assuming uncertain temperature difference, and tilt angle for the iterative solution algorithm with a unit Prandtl number (Pr = 1). Also, we perform this analysis under uncertain thermophysical properties for both FLiBe molten salt and liquid sodium as working fluid. We deploy two approaches to compute statistical moments for the resulting distributions of selected flow-field variables. The first approach is the blind computation of the mean and the standard deviation without any consideration of solution bifurcation, while the second approach utilizes k-means clustering to cluster each branch’s solutions together and compute separate statistical moments for each branch. The statistical distributions are obtained by perturbing the selected parameters about nominal values that correspond to a solution on one of the valid branches, and that solution is used as initial guess for the iterative solution algorithm. We found that perturbation of any parameter when its nominal value is close to its critical point always leads to branch jumping, i.e., the iterations converge to a solution on a branch different from the branch of the initial guess. This produces a statistical ensemble comprised of fundamentally different solutions leading to wrong mean values and uncertainty estimates, whereas clustering provides an efficient way to deal with this type of computation. This work is important for developing Gen IV nuclear systems because many of these systems rely on natural convection for cooling especially in accident conditions.

97 - MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2022

Initial exploration of a novel transient arrest system involving fuel heating

A preliminary analysis on a novel accident response system to diminish the severity of super- critical transients was conducted. The novel accident response system, called the instant shock arrest system, involves using electricity to heat the nuclear fuel at the onset of a large accidental reactivity insertion. This system is specifically designed for reactors with metallic fuel, such that the fuel is capable of conducting electricity, and being resistively heated. A reactor dynamics model of the advanced test reactor was created using the point kinetics equations and a linear reactivity feedback model to simulate how the system would effect the maximum fuel temperatures experienced during the transient. Transients with the instant shock arrest system were compared to those without it. It was found that the instant shock arrest system initially heated the fuel more than the unaffected transient but the negative reactivity inserted from such heating was enough to lower the maximum fuel temperature experienced during the transient. After simulating six different accident scenarios with reactivity insertions ranging from 0.5 to 1.3 dollar, it was found that an optimal system response could reduce peak fuel temperatures during the transient by 3.5% to 5%. Furthermore, discussion was given on how the optimal system response could be obtained using relatively simple numerical optimization algorithms due to the smoothness of the optimization problem. (authors)

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗
DOE OSTI2020

Dismantling of the Bohunice V1 Reactor Coolant System - 20011

About 2.5 kilometers from the village of Jaslovske Bohunice in the Trnava District in western Slovakia at the Bohunice V1 nuclear power plant, Westinghouse and VUJE are working on the dismantling of two VVER-440 units. The consortium was awarded this contract in October 2017 from Jadrova a vyradovacia spolocnost (JAVYS) and has begun onsite work to dismantle the reactor coolant systems of both units that operated at the plant. The Bohunice V1 plant is composed of two V-230 type VVER 440 units (440 MWe each). The first unit ceased operation on December 31, 2006, and the second on December 31, 2008, after 28 years of operation. The project strategy relies on the early release of some plant areas to allow the erection of new facilities to enable a fast and safe dismantling. These up-front activities play a crucial role within the whole project. Since schedule and ALARA are two key elements to be considered, it has been decided to separate the dry cutting activities from the ones occurring underwater. Two Wet Cutting Workshops will allow the segmentation and packaging of the high activity components. To take advantage of the large space available in the turbine building, a Dry Cutting Workshop has been built for segmenting the twelve steam generators of both units. Two more Dry Cutting Workshops (one per unit) have been installed in the reactor building for the fragmentation of the remaining large components and auxiliary systems components. This paper describes all current preparatory works as well as the on-going segmentation and packaging activities. Interesting lessons learned are also provided. (authors)

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗
DOE OSTI2026

Prediction of Creep-Induced Strain Using a Symbolic Regression-Based Model

Material creep under high-temperature conditions limits the lifetime and safety of structural systems such as advanced nuclear reactors. Conventional creep testing is slow and often produces inconsistent results across nominally identical experiments, making lifetime prediction uncertain. Here, to address these challenges, this work develops a data-driven symbolic regression (SR) model that consolidates results from duplicate creep tests and predicts the remaining strain-time curve of an ongoing experiment. The method uses piece-wise multi-objective SR with physical constraints to generate analytic, interpretable functions describing transient creep strain. Applied to Inconel Alloy 617 data, the approach achieved relative mean absolute errors of 1.0–9.5%, providing closed-form predictions of strain evolution. These results demonstrate a first step toward reducing the duration and cost of long-term creep testing while retaining physically interpretable model forms.

11 - NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Quantifying mining requirement and waste for energy sustainability

This study demonstrates the life-cycle assessment of different energy sources-coal, natural gas, solar, wind, nuclear, and hydro-particularly focused on mining activities and waste per given electricity capacity and generation.

Ermakova, Dinara [Department of Nuclear Engineerin↗
DOE OSTI2024

High-Fidelity Velocity and Concentration Measurements of Turbulent Buoyant Jets

Accurate models of turbulent buoyant flows are essential for the design of the cooling circuit of nuclear reactors and passive safety systems. However, available models fail to fully capture the physics of turbulent mixing when buoyancy becomes predominant with respect to momentum. Therefore, high-fidelity experiments of well-controlled fundamental flows are needed to develop and validate more accurate models. We analyze experiments of positive and negative turbulent buoyant jets, both in uniform and stratified environments, with the aim of understanding the thermal hydraulics of turbulent mixing with variable density and providing high-fidelity data for the development and validation of turbulence models. Non-intrusive, simultaneous particle image velocimetry and laser-induced fluorescence measurements were carried out to acquire instantaneous velocity and concentration fields on a vertical section parallel to the axis of a jet in the self-similar region. The refractive index matching method was applied to measure high-resolution buoyant jets with up to 8.6% density difference. These data are free of the typical errors that characterize optical measurements of buoyancy-driven flows (e.g. natural and mixed convection) where the refractive index of the fluid is inhomogeneous throughout the measurement domain. Turbulent statistics and entrainment of buoyant jets in uniform and stratified environments are presented. These data are compared with non-buoyant jets in a uniform environment, as a reference to investigate the effects of buoyancy and stratification on turbulent mixing. The results will be used for the assessment of current turbulence models and as a basis for the development of a new model that captures turbulent mixing.

laser induced fluorescence↗
DOE OSTI2021

Resurgence of a Nation’s Radiation Science Driven by Its Nuclear Industry Needs

This article describes the radiation facilities and associated sample preparation, management, and analysis equipment currently in place at the Dalton Cumbrian Facility, a facility which opened in 2011 to support the UK’s nuclear industry. Examples of measurements performed using these facilities are presented to illustrate their versatility and the breadth of research they make possible. Results are presented from research which furthers our understanding of radiation damage to polymeric materials, radiolytic yield of gaseous products in situations relevant to nuclear materials, radiation chemistry in light water reactor cooling systems, material chemistry relevant to immobilization of nuclear waste, and radiation-induced corrosion of fuel cladding elements. Applications of radiation chemistry relevant to health care are also described. Research concerning the mechanisms of radioprotection by dietary carotenoids is reported. An ongoing open-labware project to develop a suite of modular sample handling components suited to radiation research is described, as is the development of a new neutron source able to provide directional beams of neutrons.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗
DOE OSTI2025

PSA 2025 DPRA for Cyber Optimization

Cyberattacks can have many different attack paths, durations, and goals. There are also many different mitigation options involving hardware, software, and/or humans. Evaluating defense options should include quantitative evaluation of overall effectiveness to make cost and risk-informed decisions. Typical cyberattack modeling methods only provide a qualitative evaluation and have difficulty with time dependent scenarios. The main areas of cybersecurity are confidentiality, integrity, and availability. For companies with cyber-physical systems such as advanced nuclear reactors, cyber-related integrity is a requirement set by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But companies are also concerned about availability or reliability as a business case. As cyber threats are evolving to a business-for-hire structure, more attacks focus on disrupting business success and reliability, causing financial and economic stability risk. Companies want reliability analysis while optimizing cost, which requires more than safety modeling methods. Dynamic-state-based and Markov-based modeling provides a method for better cyber scenario modeling with timing and conditional features not found in other numerical evaluation methods. EMRALD (Event Modeling Risk Assessment using Lined Diagrams) is a dynamic risk analysis modeling and simulation tool and has features that reduce modeling issues such as state-base explosion found in Markov-based tools. It has been used to model different time-dependent events including plant behavior and operator procedures. As a general modeling tool, EMRALD can also be used to model cyberattack scenarios with varying mitigation options and quantify effectiveness, producing numerical data for risk-informed decisions. This paper uses EMRALD to demonstrate that dynamic risk analysis can be used for cyber threat modeling to provide insights for design decision-making and optimize defense strategies.

97 - MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2025

Development of High-Temperature Bonding Techniques to Enable High-Temperature Static or Dynamic Strain Measurements

Current light-water nuclear reactors rely on a variety of different sensors and sensor applications to meet their structural health monitoring needs throughout the entirety of the reactor primary, secondary, and containment systems. Optical fiber–based sensor technologies could provide solutions to reduce the sensor system footprint while enhancing the measurement fidelity and spatial resolution by leveraging distributed monitoring techniques. Moreover, advanced reactors may require optical fiber–based sensors for structural health monitoring because their operating temperatures will exceed the limits of conventional transducers used to acquire dynamic strain or acoustic data in nuclear power plants. Therefore, this report describes experiments targeting the development of high-temperature bonding techniques that would allow for potentially long lengths of fibers to be bonded to metallic reactor components in advanced reactor systems. The high temperatures experienced within target application, next-generation nuclear reactors, necessitate a high-temperature resistant bond to limit the amount of tension on the fiber at the target application temperature. The primary bonding method investigated in this work is brazing; hot-rolling has also been investigated to a lesser extent. Both techniques are well-suited to bonding optical fibers to large reactor components such as primary coolant piping, pressure vessels, or heat exchangers. Optical frequency domain reflectometry was used to monitor the strain in metal-coated optical fibers before, during, and after the high-temperature bonding process. On select optical fibers that were successfully bonded, additional thermal cycling was performed to assess the extent to which the fiber remained bonded based on the expected thermal expansion of the test specimen material. The results of the various experiments yielded the following general conclusions: (1) brazing is a viable technique for bonding and allows significant compressive strain to be applied to the fiber at room temperature; (2) hot-rolling is a viable technique as well, which has been more optimized than the brazing technique for bonding, but less residual compressive strain has been observed with this technique; and (3) both techniques will need further development and optimization to demonstrate bonding of a long length of fiber that can provably operate at relevant temperatures for an advanced nuclear reactor application.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Thermal Integration of Advanced Nuclear Reactors with a Reference Refinery, Methanol Synthesis, and a Wood Pulp Plant (Rev.1)

The present report is intended to provide process flow diagrams (PFDs) and energy and mass balance data sheets for a U.S. industrial sector subset with which nuclear heat and power could be integrated—a subset that includes the oil refining, methanol and pulp and paper industries. Coupling options for integrating nuclear energy into these industries are quantitatively outlined for reference systems, and future work will extend this analysis in greater detail. Opportunities for integrating small modular nuclear reactors (SMNRs) were investigated for each of the industrial process configurations. Aspen HYSYS and Cycle-Tempo models for a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor were developed to evaluate the proposed integration. This introductory evaluation provides a general description and assessment of the operating principles, reactor coolant core outlet temperature, and reactor size to be integrated with industry. The industrial processes of oil refining and the production of methanol, pulp and paper were simulated by using Aspen HYSYS, Aspen Plus, and the PRELIM (Petroleum Refinery Life Cycle Inventory Model) tool to develop process details. Cycle-Tempo models then extend the process modeling results to obtain net energy demands (e.g., heat, steam, and electricity) when accounting for process steam and waste heat recovery. This information is intended to foster the analysis of integrating an SMNR to decarbonize industrial facilities. The SMNR would provide reliable, competitive, and sustainable clean energy while reducing carbon emissions and other environmental impacts, such as water withdrawals, consumption, and contamination. The refining industry, exhibited in Figure ES1, is a leading consumer of fossil -fuel-based heat, power, and hydrogen in the U.S. industrial sector, generating over 164 million metric tons (MMT) of CO 2 emissions in 2023. The overall mass and energy pertaining to a generalized complex refinery in the United States is reflected in Figure ES1, along with energy metrics regarding integration with a nuclear power plant (NPP). Data sheets were developed to indicate the energy requirements for the overall refinery and each refinery process. The data sheet for the overall refinery is shown in Table ES2.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗
DOE OSTI2022

Assessment of Molten Eutectic LiF-NaF-KF Density through Experimental Determination and Semiempirical Modeling

Molten salts have favorable material properties for use in high-temperature energy systems, including thermal energy storage systems, concentrating solar power plants, nuclear reactors, and various industrial manufacturing processes. Knowledge of chemical and thermophysical property data is essential for the design and optimization of these systems, yet data are often limited or uncertain for many candidate salts due to the difficulty of thermophysical property measurements at relevant temperatures (e.g., 500–900 °C). Here, the density of molten LiF-NaF-KF eutectic is reassessed through review of previous experimental data, new density measurements from 470 to 800 °C, and semiempirical modeling. Additionally, the density was measured using the displacement technique. Compositional and temperature-dependent density estimates were calculated with a multidimensional Redlich–Kister model. The results of the new experimental measurements agree within 2% of the modeled density of molten eutectic LiF-NaF-KF. The Redlich–Kister model’s prediction shows a near-ideal density behavior for the LiF-NaF-KF system and is promising for the estimation of off-eutectic LiF-NaK-KF densities. Finally, through review of the existing literature and comparison to new measurements, recommendations are made for the density of LiF-NaF-KF.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
DOE OSTI2023

A ranking methodology for the coupling of pressurized water nuclear reactors and molten salt thermal energy storage

Thermal energy storage (TES) systems are a proposed solution to electricity market demand fluctuations and can be coupled to nuclear power plants to enable load following. Here, this work focuses on developing a methodology for evaluating potential designs for integrating a TES system into an existing pressurized water nuclear power plant. The proposed ranking methodology allows a group of experts to postulate and weigh designs based on ranking criteria derived from literature. The methodology developed in this study can aid in the final selection of a TES design for an existing nuclear power plant. The same process could be used to analyze other TES and nuclear reactor designs. The determined optimum design from this methodology was to place the TES system after the steam generator and to utilize the steam generated from the nuclear power plant to heat a molten salt TES unit. Another conclusion of this research was that human bias is prevalent during design selection, and actions such as standardized ranking criteria and large groups of experts should be used to minimize this error.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗