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
Accelerator Applications
The division was organized to promote the advancement of knowledge of the use of particle accelerator technologies for nuclear and other applications. It focuses on production of neutrons and other particles, utilization of these particles for scientific or industrial purposes, such as the production or destruction of radionuclides significant to energy, medicine, defense or other endeavors, as well as imaging and diagnostics.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
May 2025
Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
Shawn D. Pautz, Tara M. Pandya, Marvin L. Adams
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 169 | Number 3 | November 2011 | Pages 245-261
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE10-30
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The well-known “sweep” algorithm for inverting the streaming-plus-collision term in first-order deterministic radiation transport calculations suffers from parallel scaling issues caused by a lack of concurrency in the spatial dimension along the direction of particle travel. We investigate a new class of parallel algorithms that involves recasting the streaming-plus-collision problem in prefix form and solving via cyclic reduction. This method, although computationally more expensive at low levels of parallelism than the sweep algorithm, offers better theoretical scalability properties. Previous work has demonstrated this approach for one-dimensional calculations; we show how to extend it to multidimensional calculations. Notably, for multiple dimensions it appears that this approach is limited to long-characteristics discretizations; other discretizations cannot be cast in practical prefix form. Computational results on two different massively parallel computer systems demonstrate that both our “forward” and “symmetric” algorithms behave similarly, scaling well to larger degrees of parallelism than sweep-based solvers. We do observe some issues at the highest levels of parallelism (relative to the computer system size) and discuss possible causes. We conclude that this approach shows good potential for future parallel systems but that parallel scalability will depend on the architecture of the communication networks of these systems.