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Division Spotlight
Materials Science & Technology
The objectives of MSTD are: promote the advancement of materials science in Nuclear Science Technology; support the multidisciplines which constitute it; encourage research by providing a forum for the presentation, exchange, and documentation of relevant information; promote the interaction and communication among its members; and recognize and reward its members for significant contributions to the field of materials science in nuclear technology.
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.
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.