ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Division Spotlight
Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
Meeting Spotlight
Conference on Nuclear Training and Education: A Biennial International Forum (CONTE 2025)
February 3–6, 2025
Amelia Island, FL|Omni Amelia Island Resort
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
Westinghouse’s lunar microreactor concept gets a contract for continued R&D
Westinghouse Electric Company announced last week that NASA and the Department of Energy have awarded the company a contract to continue developing a lunar microreactor concept for the Fission Surface Power (FSP) project.
Brian C. Franke, Ronald P. Kensek
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 165 | Number 2 | June 2010 | Pages 170-179
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE08-68
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We describe a method that enables Monte Carlo calculations to automatically achieve a user-prescribed error of representation for numerical results. Our approach is to iteratively adapt Monte Carlo functional-expansion tallies (FETs). The adaptivity is based on assessing the cellwise 2-norm of error due to both functional-expansion truncation and statistical uncertainty. These error metrics have been detailed by others for one-dimensional distributions. We extend their previous work to three-dimensional distributions and demonstrate the use of these error metrics for adaptivity. The method examines Monte Carlo FET results, estimates truncation and uncertainty error, and suggests a minimum-required expansion order and run time to achieve the desired level of error. Iteration is required for results to converge to the desired error. Our implementation of adaptive FETs is observed to converge to reasonable levels of desired error for the representation of four distributions. In practice, some distributions and desired error levels may require prohibitively large expansion orders and/or Monte Carlo run times.