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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.
Taro Ueki, J. E. Hoogenboom, J. L. Kloosterman
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 137 | Number 2 | February 2001 | Pages 117-145
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE01-A2180
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In Monte Carlo correlated coupling, forward and adjoint particle histories are initiated in exactly opposite directions at an arbitrarily placed surface between a physical source and a physical detector. It is shown that this coupling calculation can become more efficient than standard forward calculations. In many cases, the basic form of correlated coupling is less efficient than standard forward calculations. This inherent inefficiency can be overcome by applying a black absorber perturbation to either the forward or the adjoint problem and by processing the product of batch averages as one statistical entity. The usage of the black absorber is based on the invariance of the response flow integral with a material perturbation in either the physical detector side volume in the forward problem or the physical source side volume in the adjoint problem. The batch-average product processing makes use of a quadratic increase of the nonzero coupled-score probability. All the developments have been done in such a way that improved efficiency schemes available in widely distributed Monte Carlo codes can be applied to both the forward and adjoint simulations. Also, the physical meaning of the black absorber perturbation is interpreted based on surface crossing and is numerically validated. In addition, the immediate reflection at the intermediate surface with a controlled direction change is investigated within the invariance framework. This approach can be advantageous for a void streaming problem.