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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.
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.
Dingkang Zhang, Farzad Rahnema, Abderrafi M. Ougouag
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 175 | Number 1 | September 2013 | Pages 70-80
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE12-61
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A local incident flux response expansion transport method is developed to generate transport solutions for coupling to diffusion theory codes regardless of their solution method (e.g., fine mesh, nodal, response based, finite element, etc.) for reactor core calculations in both two-dimensional (2-D) and three-dimensional (3-D) cylindrical geometries. In this approach, a Monte Carlo method is first used to precompute the local transport solution (i.e., response function library) for each unique transport coarse node, in which diffusion theory is not valid due to strong transport effects. The response function library is then used to iteratively determine the albedo coefficients on the diffusion-transport interfaces, which are then used as the coupling parameters within the diffusion code. This interface coupling technique allows a seamless integration of the transport and diffusion methods. The new method retains the detailed heterogeneity of the transport nodes and naturally constructs any local solution within them by a simple superposition of local responses to all incoming fluxes from the contiguous coarse nodes. A new technique is also developed for coupling to fine-mesh diffusion methods/codes. The local transport method/module is tested in 2-D and 3-D pebble-bed reactor benchmark problems consisting of an inner reflector, an annular fuel region, and a controlled outer reflector. It is found that the results predicted by the transport module agree very well with the reference fluxes calculated directly by MCNP in both benchmark problems.