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Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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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 News 40 Under 40 discuss the future of nuclear
Seven members of the inaugural Nuclear News 40 Under 40 came together on March 4 to discuss the current state of nuclear energy and what the future might hold for science, industry, and the public in terms of nuclear development.
To hear more insights from this talented group of young professionals, watch the “40 Under 40 Roundtable: Perspectives from Nuclear’s Rising Stars” on the ANS website.
Theophile Bonnet, Hunter Belanger, Davide Mancusi, Andrea Zoia
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 198 | Number 11 | November 2024 | Pages 2120-2147
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2288328
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The investigation of correlations in Monte Carlo power iteration has long been dominated by the question of generational correlations and their effects on the estimation of statistical uncertainties. More recently, there has been a growing interest in spatial correlations, prompted by the discovery of neutron clustering. Despite several attempts, a comprehensive framework concerning how Monte Carlo sampling strategies, population control, and variance reduction methods affect the strength of such correlations is still lacking. In this work, we propose a set of global and local (i.e., space-dependent) tallies that can be used to characterize the impact of correlations. These tallies encompass Shannon entropy, pair distance, normalized variance, and Feynman moment. In order to have a clean yet fully meaningful setting, we carry out our analysis in a few homogeneous and heterogeneous benchmark problems of varying dominance ratio. Several classes of collision sampling strategies, population control, and variance reduction techniques are tested, and their relative advantages and drawbacks are assessed with respect to the proposed tallies. The major finding of our study is that branchless collisions, which suppress the emergence of branches in neutron histories, also considerably reduce the effects of correlations in most of the explored configurations.