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Division Spotlight
Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
Meeting Spotlight
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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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.
Hrabri L. Rajic, Abderrafi M. Ougouag
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 103 | Number 4 | December 1989 | Pages 392-408
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE89-A23691
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A nodal multigroup neutron diffusion method for modern computer architectures has been developed and implemented in the ILLICO code. Vectorization and parallelization strategies that are successful in speeding up modern nodal computations on commercially available supercomputers have been identified and applied. Realistic three-dimensional benchmark problems can be solved in the vectorized mode in <0.73 s (33.86 Mflops). Vector-concurrent implementations are shown to yield speedups as high as 9.19 on eight processors. These results demonstrate that modern nodal methods, such as ILLICO, can preserve essentially all of their speed advantages (demonstrated on scalar computers) over finite difference methods. Several ways of treating two-dimensional reactor problems with nonsquare (“jagged”) boundaries as rectangular domain problems are presented and their effectiveness evaluated. They result in nonnegligible performance improvements and can be devised so as to preserve the physics of the initial problem.