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Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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Utility Working Conference and Vendor Technology Expo (UWC 2024)
August 4–7, 2024
Marco Island, FL|JW Marriott Marco Island
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
ARPA-E announces $40 million to develop transmutation technologies for UNF
The Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) announced $40 million in funding to develop cutting-edge technologies to enable the transmutation of used nuclear fuel into less-radioactive substances. According to ARPA-E, the new initiative addresses one of the agency’s core goals as outlined by Congress: to provide transformative solutions to improve the management, cleanup, and disposal of radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel.
Dingkang Zhang, Farzad Rahnema
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 176 | Number 1 | January 2014 | Pages 69-80
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE13-1
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this work, a high-order perturbation method is developed to generate/compute response functions for the coarse mesh transport (COMET) method, which provides whole-core neutron transport solutions to various reactor core types. In this approach, the response functions are first generated at a reference eigenvalue point, and the response functions at an arbitrary eigenvalue are computed as a high-order perturbation from the reference point. The method has been tested at both the lattice level (response function generation) and the core level (whole-core transport calculations). At the lattice level, it is found that the response functions predicted by the perturbation method agree very well with those directly computed by the Monte Carlo method. The average relative difference in the surface-to-surface response functions is 0.29% to 0.46% when the eigenvalue k ranges from 0.6667 to 1.5. In whole-core transport calculations, the COMET calculations using the high-order perturbation method are almost identical to those using the interpolation method. The eigenvalue, assembly, and pin fission densities predicted by COMET agree very well with the MCNP reference solution. This indicates that the high-order perturbation response function generation method can achieve the same accuracy as the interpolation method while significantly improving the computational efficiency of the precomputation phase.