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Division Spotlight
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Winter Conference and Expo
November 17–21, 2024
Orlando, FL|Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Latest News
NRC issues subsequent license for North Anna plant
Dominion Energy’s North Anna nuclear power plant received its second operating license renewal earlier this week, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced.
North Anna Units 1 and 2 are twin 973-MWe three-loop Westinghouse pressurized water reactors located about 40 miles northwest of Richmond, Va. Unit 1’s operating license will now expire April 1, 2058, and Unit 2’s will expire August 21, 2060.
S. Santandrea, D. Sciannandrone, R. Sanchez, L. Mao, L. Graziano
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 186 | Number 3 | June 2017 | Pages 239-276
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2016.1273634
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this paper we describe some recent developments in the Method of Characteristics (MOC) for three-dimensional (3D) extruded geometries in the nuclear reactor analysis code APOLLO3®. We discuss the parallel strategies implemented for the transport sweep of the MOC solver in the OpenMP framework, and introduce the 3D version of the DPN operator that is customarily used in APOLLO2 to accelerate MOC convergence. In order to provide good physical results, we have also coupled the MOC with the self-shielding environment of APOLLO3®. We describe, in particular, the coupling techniques necessary to implement a full subgroup cross-section self-shielding method and a specialized version of the Tone self-shielding technique. In this framework, we use part of the tracking method used for the 3D calculation to provide the two-dimensional Collision Probability Method (CPM) coefficients necessary to produce the self-shielding calculations. We will show some important computational speedups also in the CPM of APOLLO3® with respect to the APOLLO2 CPM equivalent implementation, including the parallelization issue. Finally, we will compare our approach toward a Monte Carlo calculation of a fast breeder reactor hexagonal assembly representing a fertile-fissile interface.