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Decommissioning & Environmental Sciences
The mission of the Decommissioning and Environmental Sciences (DES) Division is to promote the development and use of those skills and technologies associated with the use of nuclear energy and the optimal management and stewardship of the environment, sustainable development, decommissioning, remediation, reutilization, and long-term surveillance and maintenance of nuclear-related installations, and sites. The target audience for this effort is the membership of the Division, the Society, and the public at large.
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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Latest News
NRC engineers share their expertise at the University of Puerto Rico
Robert Roche-Rivera and Marcos Rolón-Acevedo are licensed professional engineers who work at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They are also alumni of the University of Puerto Rico–Mayagüez (UPRM) and have been sharing their knowledge and experience with students at their alma mater since last year, serving as adjunct professors in the university’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. During the 2023–2024 school year, they each taught two courses: Fundamentals of Nuclear Science and Engineering, and Nuclear Power Plant Engineering.
Amelia Trainer, Benoit Forget
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 8 | August 2023 | Pages 1873-1886
Technical papers from: PHYSOR 2022 | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2162302
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Accurate representation of thermal neutron scattering in Monte Carlo transport simulations requires that the molecular vibrations of the target material be accounted for. Historically, this has been achieved by precomputing large multidimensional tables that are a function of temperature and the cosine of the scattering angle, as well as incoming and outgoing neutron energy. Most commonly used sampling techniques for thermal neutron scattering rely on large multidimensional tables, where higher resolution results in an increase in required memory and attempts to reduce memory can result in grid coarseness errors. An alternative sampling method is introduced here that is a significant departure from precomputed tables and instead relies on a more physical model of the scattering behavior. The phonon sampling method classifies neutron scattering events by the number of phonons excited/de-excited during the scattering collision. In doing so, energy exchange may be obtained via rejection sampling, and an analytical representation of the momentum exchange is obtained. This sampling method has been tested on graphite, yttrium hydride, and uranium nitride, and preliminary implementation of the phonon sampling method shows accurate results for angular and energy distributions, though resulting in up to a 40% slowdown in overall calculation time. This notable slowdown is countered, however, by a large reduction in storage (over 99% reduction compared to standard multidimensional tables).