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2026 Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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Latest News
Bechtel-led SIMCO awarded three-year WIPP contract extension
The Department of Energy has issued a three-year contract extension to Salado Isolation Mining Contractors (SIMCO), a single-purpose entity comprising Bechtel National and Los Alamos Technical Associates as a teaming contractor, for the continued management and operations of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the DOE’s geologic repository for defense-generated transuranic waste in southeastern New Mexico.
Ketaki Joshi, Nicholas Branam, Isaac Meyer, Ben Forget, Abdulla Alhajri, Vladimir Sobes
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 7 | July 2023 | Pages 1356-1363
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2159268
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An analytic benchmark for nuclear data uncertainty propagation in k-eigenvalue calculations is demonstrated. Flat-flux-weighted cross-section covariance matrices are available in the ENDF/B library for many isotopes. For application-specific purposes, flux-weighted multigroup cross sections with carefully constructed energy group boundaries are desired. In this paper, we use the covariance information from ENDF/B-VII.1 for the defined continuous-energy cross section and an artificially inflated variance version of the same covariance matrix for first-order and Monte Carlo propagation of uncertainty calculations. A flat-flux weighting function is used for the continuous-energy cross-section uncertainty collapse resulting in a higher propagated uncertainty on the k-eigenvalue as the group structure becomes coarser. The results of this analytic benchmark suggest that the reporting of flat-flux-weighted multigroup cross-section covariance matrices at the ENDF level may lead to inaccurate predictions of the uncertainty on the k-eigenvalue for certain applications. This work implies that not only should the resonance parameter uncertainties that go into the calculation of the continuous-energy cross sections be published, but the parameter uncertainties should also be processed into continuous-energy cross-section uncertainties that can be collapsed to application-specific multigroup cross-section covariance matrices.