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Division Spotlight
Isotopes & Radiation
Members are devoted to applying nuclear science and engineering technologies involving isotopes, radiation applications, and associated equipment in scientific research, development, and industrial processes. Their interests lie primarily in education, industrial uses, biology, medicine, and health physics. Division committees include Analytical Applications of Isotopes and Radiation, Biology and Medicine, Radiation Applications, Radiation Sources and Detection, and Thermal Power Sources.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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
TerraPower begins U.K. regulatory approval process
Seattle-based TerraPower signaled its interest this week in building its Natrium small modular reactor in the United Kingdom, the company announced.
TerraPower sent a letter to the U.K.’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, formally establishing its intention to enter the U.K. generic design assessment (GDA) process. This is TerraPower’s first step in deployment of its Natrium technology—a 345-MW sodium fast reactor coupled with a molten salt energy storage unit—on the international stage.
Taro Ueki, Forrest B. Brown
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 149 | Number 1 | January 2005 | Pages 38-50
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE04-15
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In Monte Carlo criticality calculations, source error propagation through the stationary (active) cycles and source convergence in the settling (inactive) cycles are both dominated by the dominance ratio (DR) of fission kernels. For symmetric two-fissile-component systems with the DR close to unity, the extinction of fission source sites can occur in one of the components even when the initial source is symmetric and the number of histories per cycle is more than 1000. When such a system is made slightly asymmetric, the neutron effective multiplication factor at the inactive cycles does not reflect the convergence to stationary source distribution. To overcome this problem, relative entropy has been applied to a slightly asymmetric two-fissile-component problem with a DR of 0.993. The numerical results are mostly satisfactory but also show the possibility of the occasional occurrence of unnecessarily strict stationarity diagnostics. Therefore, a criterion is defined based on the concept of data compression limit in information theory. Numerical results for a pressurized water reactor fuel storage facility with a DR of 0.994 strongly support the efficacy of relative entropy in both the posterior and progressive stationarity diagnostics.