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Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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Latest News
Norway’s Halden reactor takes first step toward decommissioning
The government of Norway has granted the transfer of the Halden research reactor from the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) to the state agency Norwegian Nuclear Decommissioning (NND). The 25-MWt Halden boiling water reactor operated from 1958 to 2018 and was used in the research of nuclear fuel, reactor internals, plant procedures and monitoring, and human factors.
Zhaopeng Zhong, Thomas J. Downar, Yunlin Xu, Mark D. DeHart, Kevin T. Clarno
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 158 | Number 3 | March 2008 | Pages 289-298
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE06-24TN
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The coarse-mesh finite difference (CMFD) formulation is applied as an efficient means of acceleration of the heterogeneous whole-core transport calculation. The CMFD formulation enables dynamic homogenization of the cells during the iterative solution process such that the heterogeneous transport solution can be preserved. Dynamic group condensation is also possible with a two-level CMFD formulation involving alternate multigroup and two-group calculations. The two-dimensional discrete ordinates (SN) method is used as the kernel to generate the heterogeneous solution; the CMFD solution provides the SN kernel with much faster convergence of fission and scattering source distributions. In this paper, the two-level CMFD acceleration has been tested using the VENUS-2 two-dimensional whole-core model; it is shown that the number of SN transport sweeps can be reduced by a factor of about 10 while exactly reproducing the original transport solution. The second level of CMFD acceleration is also significant in reducing the computation time. The application of the CMFD formulation in arbitrary geometry demonstrates that CMFD also works well for irregular geometries.