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Human Factors, Instrumentation & Controls
Improving task performance, system reliability, system and personnel safety, efficiency, and effectiveness are the division's main objectives. Its major areas of interest include task design, procedures, training, instrument and control layout and placement, stress control, anthropometrics, psychological input, and motivation.
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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.
Lianyan Liu, Robin P. Gardner
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 125 | Number 2 | February 1997 | Pages 188-195
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE97-A24265
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new importance map approach for Monte Carlo simulation that can be used in an adaptive fashion has been identified and developed. It is based on using a mesh-based system of weight windows that are independent of any physical geometric cells. It consists of an importance map generator and a splitting and Russian roulette algorithm for a mesh-based weight windows game that is used in an iterative fashion to obtain increasingly efficient results. The general purpose Monte Carlo code MCNP is modified to incorporate this new mesh-based importance map generator and matching weight window technique for variance reduction. Two nuclear well logging problems—one for neutrons and the other for gamma rays—are used to test the new importance map generator. Results show that the new generator is able to produce four to six times larger figures of merit than MCNP’s physical geometry cell-based importance map generator. More importantly, the superior user friendliness of this new mesh-based generator makes variance reduction easy to accomplish.