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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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ANS joins others in seeking to discuss SNF/HLW impasse
The American Nuclear Society joined seven other organizations to send a letter to Energy Secretary Christopher Wright on July 8, asking to meet with him to discuss “the restoration of a highly functioning program to meet DOE’s legal responsibility to manage and dispose of the nation’s commercial and legacy defense spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and high-level radioactive waste (HLW).”
G. C. Pomraning, M. Clark, Jr.
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 16 | Number 2 | June 1963 | Pages 155-164
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE63-A26495
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The monoenergetic integro-differential Boltzmann equation with an arbitrary scattering kernel is transformed to a self-adjoint form and the corresponding Lagrangian written. It is shown that this transformation results in a loss of the continuity (neutron conservation) information contained by the Boltzmann equation. This information is recovered by writing the directional flux as the sum of an even and odd function (in angle) and considering a self-adjoint Lagrangian for only one portion (even or odd) of the directional flux. This procedure is shown to be equivalent to separating the nonself-adjointness from the Boltzmann operator. Further, it is shown that this self-adjoint principle is an extremum principle if the mean number of secondaries per collision is less than one. This self-adjoint formalism is applied to the angular expansion of the directional flux which results in an improved diffusion theory. Numerical results for the linear extrapolation distance and diffusion coefficient are compared with the classical (P − 1) diffusion theory.