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
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Jul 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
August 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
July 2025
Latest News
Hash Hashemian: Visionary leadership
As Dr. Hashem M. “Hash” Hashemian prepares to step into his term as President of the American Nuclear Society, he is clear that he wants to make the most of this unique moment.
A groundswell in public approval of nuclear is finding a home in growing governmental support that is backed by a tailwind of technological innovation. “Now is a good time to be in nuclear,” Hashemian said, as he explained the criticality of this moment and what he hoped to accomplish as president.
Paul Nelson, James Jeffery
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 100 | Number 3 | November 1988 | Pages 237-247
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE88-A29036
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Under a definition suitable to the transport equation, it is shown that the (two-stage explicit) Runge-Kutta (RK) methods having order of at least 2, and requiring “essentially” only one source evaluation per cell, consist of a one-parameter family, plus two additional methods. Two of these, the midpoint corrector and improved Euler methods, are selected for detailed computational comparison with the classical diamond-difference and step characteristic methods. Extensive monodirectional calculations reveal that the RK methods display absolute instability for cell path lengths exceeding 2 mfp, but that they are nearly competitive with the classical methods for small cell widths. It is shown how the two subject RK methods can be augmented by “closure approximations, ”so as to permit their use in source iteration for multiple-direction calculations. The results of such calculations show that for small cell widths, the RK methods again are nearly competitive in accuracy, although the absolute stability requirement can impose a stringent upper bound on the acceptable cell widths; the RK methods interact well with source iteration, even though they do not conserve particles; and the particular closure approximations selected retain the second-order accuracy of the basic underlying methods.