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Division Spotlight
Nuclear Criticality Safety
NCSD provides communication among nuclear criticality safety professionals through the development of standards, the evolution of training methods and materials, the presentation of technical data and procedures, and the creation of specialty publications. In these ways, the division furthers the exchange of technical information on nuclear criticality safety with the ultimate goal of promoting the safe handling of fissionable materials outside reactors.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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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May 2025
Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
Hanlin Shu, Liangzhi Cao, Qingming He, Qi Zheng, Tao Dai
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 198 | Number 11 | November 2024 | Pages 2209-2229
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2295065
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The unstructured mesh (UM)–based Monte Carlo (MC) method can utilize modern computer-aided-design/computer-aided-engineering platforms to obtain geometric models with reduced human effort and is capable of generating high-resolution tally data. This approach presents a significant advantage over the traditional Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG)–based MC method in handling complex geometries and conducting multiphysics calculations. In this study, the UM-based MC calculation capability was developed in the MC code NECP-MCX. On this basis, an automatic UM-based Consistent Adjoint-Driven Importance Sampling (CADIS) method was further studied and implemented in which the adjoint deterministic calculation, forward MC calculation, and variance reduction (VR) parameter generation were performed on the unified UM model. To achieve this, the discrete ordinates (SN)–Discontinuous Finite Element Method (DFEM) code NECP-SUN was embedded into NECP-MCX as the adjoint transport solver. Validations of the developed code and evaluations of the VR performance of the UM-based CADIS method were conducted on the Pool Critical Assembly (PCA) Replica benchmark and H. B. Robinson Unit 2 (HBR-2) benchmark. The numerical results indicated that the developed UM-based particle tracking capability achieved comparable accuracy to the CSG-based approach. Furthermore, compared to the traditional CADIS method, the UM-based CADIS method demonstrated higher figure-of-merit (FOM) values (3.5 to 44 times higher for the PCA Replica benchmark and 2.22 to 2.92 times higher for the HBR-2 benchmark), highlighting the superior VR performance of the UM-based CADIS method over the traditional CADIS method.
