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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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Deep Space: The new frontier of radiation controls
In commercial nuclear power, there has always been a deliberate tension between the regulator and the utility owner. The regulator fundamentally exists to protect the worker, and the utility, to make a profit. It is a win-win balance.
From the U.S. nuclear industry has emerged a brilliantly successful occupational nuclear safety record—largely the result of an ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) process that has driven exposure rates down to what only a decade ago would have been considered unthinkable. In the U.S. nuclear industry, the system has accomplished an excellent, nearly seamless process that succeeds to the benefit of both employee and utility owner.
Naoki Sugimura, Akio Yamamoto, Tadashi Ushio, Masaaki Mori, Masato Tabuchi, Tomohiro Endo
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 155 | Number 2 | February 2007 | Pages 276-289
Technical Paper | Mathematics and Computation, Supercomputing, Reactor Physics and Nuclear and Biological Applications | doi.org/10.13182/NSE155-276
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A very rigorous and advanced next-generation neutronics design system, AEGIS (Anisotropic, Extended Geometry, Integrated Neutronics Solver), which is based on the deterministic method, is being developed using advanced computer science technology. The method of characteristics, which has the merit of treating heterogeneous geometry explicitly, is utilized in AEGIS as a neutron transport solver. So, the AEGIS code can explicitly model many types of fuel lattices in both commercial light water reactors (LWRs) and advanced reactors such as Generation IV reactors. The AEGIS code can also treat higher-order anisotropic scattering accurately based on spherical harmonics expansion. To compute a large-scale problem, a nonuniform ray-tracing method is implemented in AEGIS. It utilizes the Gauss-Legendre quadrature weight and the macroband method to decide position and width of ray traces to reduce spatial discretization error efficiently. The transport solution of AEGIS has been verified through various benchmark problems. It was found that the AEGIS code can explicitly treat complicated geometry and can efficiently solve a large-scale problem. These results show that flexibility in handling geometry and the very rigorous neutronics calculation models of AEGIS will contribute to predicting neutronics characteristics accurately, not only for commercial LWRs but also for advanced reactors.