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Division Spotlight
Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
Meeting Spotlight
ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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
First astatine-labeled compound shipped in the U.S.
The Department of Energy’s National Isotope Development Center (NIDC) on March 31 announced the successful long-distance shipment in the United States of a biologically active compound labeled with the medical radioisotope astatine-211 (At-211). Because previous shipments have included only the “bare” isotope, the NIDC has described the development as “unleashing medical innovation.”
Samuel Olivier, Terry S. Haut
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 198 | Number 6 | June 2024 | Pages 1179-1214
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2238171
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We present high-order, finite element–based Second Moment Methods (SMMs) for solving radiation transport problems in two spatial dimensions. We leverage the close connection between the Variable Eddington Factor (VEF) method and SMM to convert existing discretizations of the VEF moment system to discretizations of the SMM moment system. The moment discretizations are coupled to a high-order Discontinuous Galerkin discretization of the SN transport equations. We show that the resulting methods achieve high-order accuracy on high-order (curved) meshes, preserve the thick diffusion limit, and are effective on a challenging multimaterial problem both in outer fixed-point iterations and in inner preconditioned iterative solver iterations for the discrete moment systems. We also present parallel scaling results and provide direct comparisons to the VEF algorithms from which the SMM algorithms were derived.