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Division Spotlight
Isotopes & Radiation
Members are devoted to applying nuclear science and engineering technologies involving isotopes, radiation applications, and associated equipment in scientific research, development, and industrial processes. Their interests lie primarily in education, industrial uses, biology, medicine, and health physics. Division committees include Analytical Applications of Isotopes and Radiation, Biology and Medicine, Radiation Applications, Radiation Sources and Detection, and Thermal Power Sources.
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.
Dingkang Zhang, Farzad Rahnema
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 9 | September 2023 | Pages 2498-2508
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2196936
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The COarse MEsh Transport (COMET) method, a hybrid continuous energy stochastic and deterministic transport method/tool based on the incident flux response expansion theory, is capable of providing highly accurate and efficient continuous energy whole-core neutron solutions to various heterogeneous reactor cores. In this work, a novel low-order (zeroth-order) acceleration technique is developed to significantly improve COMET’s computational efficiency for core calculations. This new method is based on consistent coupled low-order and high-order calculations to obtain the COMET core solution. In the low-order calculations, COMET is used to converge the total partial current escaping from each coarse mesh and the core eigenvalue. The resulting fixed-source problem in which the off-diagonal terms (equivalent to the scattering and fission neutron sources) are constructed by the zeroth-order solution are efficiently solved by the high-order COMET calculations. The resulting high-order angular flux on each coarse mesh bounding surface is then used to update (collapse) the low-order response coefficients. The coupled low-order and high-order calculations are repeated until both the eigenvalue and the low-order response coefficients are converged. The new acceleration method is implemented into COMET and tested in a set of stylized Advanced High Temperature Reactor (AHTR) benchmark problems. It is found that the core eigenvalues and the local fission density distributions predicted by COMET with the low-order acceleration agree very well with those computed by the original COMET. The eigenvalue discrepancy varies from 0 to 1 pcm, and the average relative differences in the stripewise and assembly-average fission density distributions are in the range of 0.021% to 0.032% and 0.004% to 0.01%, respectively. The comparisons have shown that the new low-order acceleration method can maintain COMET’s accuracy while improving its computational efficiency for core calculations by 12 to 16 times.