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.
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
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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
August 2024
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
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.
Shaopeng Xia, Maosong Cheng, Zhimin Dai
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 194 | Number 12 | December 2020 | Pages 1143-1161
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1776057
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Burnup calculations play a very important role in nuclear reactor design and analysis, and solving burnup equations is an essential topic in burnup calculations. In the last decade, several high-accuracy methods, mainly including the Chebyshev rational approximation method (CRAM), the quadrature-based rational approximation method, the Laguerre polynomial approximation method, and the mini-max polynomial approximation method, have been proposed to solve the burnup equations. Although these methods have been demonstrated to be quite successful in the burnup calculations, limitations still exist in some cases, one of which is that the accuracy becomes compromised when treating the time-dependent polynomial external feed rate. In this work, a new method called the Padé rational approximation method (PRAM) is proposed. Without directly approximating the matrix exponential, this new method is derived by using the Padé rational function to approximate the scalar exponential function in the formula of the inverse Laplace transform of burnup equations. Several test cases are carried out to verify the proposed new method. The high accuracy of the PRAM is validated by comparing the numerical results with the high-precision reference solutions. Against CRAM, PRAM is significantly superior in handling the burnup equations with time-dependent polynomial external feed rates and is much more efficient in improving the accuracy by using substeps, which demonstrates that PRAM is the attractive method for burnup calculations.