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Division Spotlight
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.
Meeting Spotlight
Conference on Nuclear Training and Education: A Biennial International Forum (CONTE 2025)
February 3–6, 2025
Amelia Island, FL|Omni Amelia Island Resort
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
Terrestrial Energy looks at EnergySolutions-owned sites for IMSR plants
Advanced reactor developer Terrestrial Energy and Utah-based waste management company EnergySolutions announced they have signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on the siting and deployment of Terrestrial Energy’s integral molten salt reactor plants at EnergySolutions-owned sites.
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.