ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2026
Jan 2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
May 2026
Nuclear Technology
February 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
3D Printing Possibilities: Additive Manufacturing Impact Limiters for Transportation Casks
With the significant advances in additive manufacturing (AM), otherwise known as 3D printing, Orano Federal Services and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte recently re-examined the capabilities to print impact limiters for transportation casks used to ship spent nuclear fuel. Impact limiters protect transportation casks (sometimes also referred to as transportation overpacks) and their contents during an accident. Impact limiter designs must withstand testing based on a certain significance level of hypothetical accidents, including drops, crushing, fires, and immersion in water.
Pierre Guérin, Anne-Marie Baudron, Jean-Jacques Lautard, Serge Van Criekingen
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 155 | Number 2 | February 2007 | Pages 264-275
Technical Paper | Mathematics and Computation, Supercomputing, Reactor Physics and Nuclear and Biological Applications | doi.org/10.13182/NSE07-A2661
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper describes a new technique for determining the pin power in heterogeneous three-dimensional calculations. It is based on a domain decomposition with overlapping subdomains and a component mode synthesis (CMS) technique for the global flux determination. Local basis functions are used to span a discrete space that allows fundamental global mode approximation through a Galerkin technique. Two approaches are given to obtain these local basis functions. In the first one (the CMS method), the first few spatial eigenfunctions are computed on each subdomain, using periodic boundary conditions. In the second one (factorized CMS method), only the fundamental mode is computed, and we use a factorization principle for the flux in order to replace the higher-order eigenmodes. These different local spatial functions are extended to the global domain by defining them as zero outside the subdomain. These methods are well fitted for heterogeneous core calculations because the spatial interface modes are taken into account in the domain decomposition. Although these methods could be applied to higher-order angular approximations - particularly easily to an SPN approximation - the numerical results we provide are obtained using a diffusion model. We show the methods' accuracy for reactor cores loaded with uranium dioxide and mixed oxide assemblies, for which standard reconstruction techniques are known to perform poorly. Furthermore, we show that our methods are highly and easily parallelizable.