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Robotics & Remote Systems
The Mission of the Robotics and Remote Systems Division is to promote the development and application of immersive simulation, robotics, and remote systems for hazardous environments for the purpose of reducing hazardous exposure to individuals, reducing environmental hazards and reducing the cost of performing work.
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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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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.
Steven J. Plimpton, Bruce Hendrickson, Shawn P. Burns, William McLendon III, Lawrence Rauchwerger
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 150 | Number 3 | July 2005 | Pages 267-283
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE150-267
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The method of discrete ordinates is commonly used to solve the Boltzmann transport equation. The solution in each ordinate direction is most efficiently computed by sweeping the radiation flux across the computational grid. For unstructured grids this poses many challenges, particularly when implemented on distributed-memory parallel machines where the grid geometry is spread across processors. We present several algorithms relevant to this approach: (a) an asynchronous message-passing algorithm that performs sweeps simultaneously in multiple ordinate directions, (b) a simple geometric heuristic to prioritize the computational tasks that a processor works on, (c) a partitioning algorithm that creates columnar-style decompositions for unstructured grids, and (d) an algorithm for detecting and eliminating cycles that sometimes exist in unstructured grids and can prevent sweeps from successfully completing. Algorithms (a) and (d) are fully parallel; algorithms (b) and (c) can be used in conjunction with (a) to achieve higher parallel efficiencies. We describe our message-passing implementations of these algorithms within a radiation transport package. Performance and scalability results are given for unstructured grids with up to 3 million elements (500 million unknowns) running on thousands of processors of Sandia National Laboratories' Intel Tflops machine and DEC-Alpha CPlant cluster.