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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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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
New laws offer nuclear industry incentives for existing power plant uprates
This year, the U.S. nuclear industry received a much-needed economic boost that could help preserve operating nuclear power plants and incentivize upgrades that extend their lifespan and power output.
Signed into law in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act offers production tax credits (PTCs) for existing nuclear power plants and either PTCs or investment tax credits (ITCs) for new carbon-free generation. These credits could make power uprates—increasing the maximum power level at which a commercial plant may operate—a much more appealing option for utilities.
Allan B. Wollaber, Edward W. Larsen, Jeffery D. Densmore
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 173 | Number 3 | March 2013 | Pages 259-275
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE11-101
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
It is well known that temperature solutions of the Implicit Monte Carlo (IMC) equations can exceed the external boundary temperatures, a violation of the “maximum principle.” Previous attempts to prescribe a maximum value of the time-step size Δt that is sufficient to eliminate these violations have recommended a Δt that is typically too small to be used in practice and that appeared to be much too conservative when compared to the actual Δt required to prevent maximum principle violations in numerical solutions of the IMC equations. In this paper we derive a new, approximate estimator for the maximum time-step size that includes the spatial-grid size Δx of the temperature field. We also provide exact necessary and sufficient conditions on the maximum time-step size that are easier to calculate. These explicitly demonstrate that the effect of coarsening Δx is to reduce the limitation on Δt. This helps explain the overly conservative nature of the earlier, grid-independent results. We demonstrate that the new time-step restriction is a much more accurate predictor of violations of the maximum principle. We discuss how the implications of the new, grid-dependent time-step restriction can affect IMC solution algorithms.