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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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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.
Cheuk Y. Lau, Marvin L. Adams
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 185 | Number 1 | January 2017 | Pages 36-52
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE16-28
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We present a new family of discrete ordinates (Sn) angular quadratures based on discontinuous finite elements (DFEMs) in angle. The angular domain is divided into spherical quadrilaterals (SQs) on the unit sphere surface. Linear discontinuous finite element (LDFE) and quadratic discontinuous finite element (QDFE) basis functions in the direction cosines are defined over each SQ, producing LDFE-SQ and QDFE-SQ angular quadratures, respectively. The new angular quadratures demonstrate more uniform direction and weight distributions than previous DFEM-based angular quadratures, local refinement capability, strictly positive weights, generation to large numbers of directions, and fourth-order accurate high-degree spherical harmonics (SH) integration. Results suggest that particle-conservation errors due to inexact high-degree SH integration rapidly diminish with quadrature refinement and tend to be orders of magnitude smaller than other discretization errors affecting the solution. Results also demonstrate that the performance of the new angular quadratures without local refinement is on par with or better than that of traditional angular quadratures for various radiation transport problems. The performance of the new angular quadratures can be further improved by using local refinement, especially within an adaptive Sn algorithm.