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Division Spotlight
Accelerator Applications
The division was organized to promote the advancement of knowledge of the use of particle accelerator technologies for nuclear and other applications. It focuses on production of neutrons and other particles, utilization of these particles for scientific or industrial purposes, such as the production or destruction of radionuclides significant to energy, medicine, defense or other endeavors, as well as imaging and diagnostics.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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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May 2025
Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
S. Santandrea, D. Sciannandrone, R. Sanchez, L. Mao, L. Graziano
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 186 | Number 3 | June 2017 | Pages 239-276
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2016.1273634
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this paper we describe some recent developments in the Method of Characteristics (MOC) for three-dimensional (3D) extruded geometries in the nuclear reactor analysis code APOLLO3®. We discuss the parallel strategies implemented for the transport sweep of the MOC solver in the OpenMP framework, and introduce the 3D version of the DPN operator that is customarily used in APOLLO2 to accelerate MOC convergence. In order to provide good physical results, we have also coupled the MOC with the self-shielding environment of APOLLO3®. We describe, in particular, the coupling techniques necessary to implement a full subgroup cross-section self-shielding method and a specialized version of the Tone self-shielding technique. In this framework, we use part of the tracking method used for the 3D calculation to provide the two-dimensional Collision Probability Method (CPM) coefficients necessary to produce the self-shielding calculations. We will show some important computational speedups also in the CPM of APOLLO3® with respect to the APOLLO2 CPM equivalent implementation, including the parallelization issue. Finally, we will compare our approach toward a Monte Carlo calculation of a fast breeder reactor hexagonal assembly representing a fertile-fissile interface.
