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
ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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
May 2025
Nuclear Technology
April 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Norway’s Halden reactor takes first step toward decommissioning
The government of Norway has granted the transfer of the Halden research reactor from the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) to the state agency Norwegian Nuclear Decommissioning (NND). The 25-MWt Halden boiling water reactor operated from 1958 to 2018 and was used in the research of nuclear fuel, reactor internals, plant procedures and monitoring, and human factors.
I. Carlvik
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 31 | Number 2 | February 1968 | Pages 295-303
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE31-295
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A method has been developed for the solution of the monoenergetic critical problem for a slab or a sphere. The method utilizes an expansion of the flux density in Legendre polynomials of the coordinate. It is equivalent to the usual variational method using powers of the coordinate, but the use of Legendre polynomials makes it possible to calculate most of the elements of the resulting matrix by means of recurrence formulae. A series of calculations has been performed for slabs and spheres with ≤ 5, where is the thickness of the slab or the diameter of the sphere measured in mean-free-paths. The critical problem is equivalent to the problem of determining the decay constant of a subcritical system with an exponentially decaying flux density. In consequence, the calculations also give a series of decay constants for subcritical slabs and spheres. Comparisons with diffusion theory show that large errors can result from uncritical application of diffusion theory to small assemblies. The author would recommend that measurements on small pulsed assemblies be analyzed by means of more accurate methods; for example, the present method extended to multigroup treatment of the energy dependence. The results of the calculations show clearly the interesting fact that the exponentially decaying flux of very small spheres has a minimum at the center.