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.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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
Jan 2026
Jul 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
January 2026
Nuclear Technology
December 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
November 2025
Latest News
CFS working with NVIDIA, Siemens on SPARC digital twin
Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a fusion firm headquartered in Devens, Mass., is collaborating with California-based computing infrastructure company NVIDIA and Germany-based technology conglomerate Siemens to develop a digital twin of its SPARC fusion machine. The cooperative work among the companies will focus on applying artificial intelligence and data- and project-management tools as the SPARC digital twin is developed.
J. Ernest Wilkins, Jr. Keshav N. Srivastava
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 82 | Number 3 | December 1982 | Pages 316-324
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE82-A19392
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We prove two mathematically rigorous theorems that assert, under certain carefully stated hypotheses, the validity of the Goertzel and Otsuka conclusions that, in a thermal nuclear reactor that has a minimum critical mass, the fuel must be distributed so that the product of the thermal neutron flux and the adjoint thermal neutron flux is a constant in the core and does not exceed that constant in the reflector. These theorems differ from that in the preceding paper in the sense that some of the hypotheses of the earlier theorem have been strengthened and some weakened. The hypotheses can be weakened still further if we restrict attention to a fixed core and are not interested in results concerning the reflector. We also study the second variation of the critical mass functional. Finally, we show that, under some explicitly stated conditions, the multigroup diffusion theory for a thermal reactor can be treated as a special case of our general theory.