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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
2024 ANS Winter Conference and Expo
November 17–21, 2024
Orlando, FL|Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld
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
MIT’s nuclear professional courses benefit United States—and now Australia too
Some 30 nuclear engineering departments at universities across the United States graduate more than 900 students every year. These young men and women are the present and future of the domestic nuclear industry as it seeks to develop and deploy advanced nuclear energy technologies, grow its footprint on the power grid, and penetrate new markets while continuing to run the existing fleet of reactors reliably and economically.
Zeyun Wu, Qiong Zhang, Hany Abdel-Khalik
Nuclear Technology | Volume 180 | Number 3 | December 2012 | Pages 372-382
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the Initial Release of MCNP6 / Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT12-A15350
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new variant of a hybrid Monte Carlo-deterministic approach for simulating particle transport problems is presented and compared to the SCALE FW-CADIS approach. The new approach, denoted as the SUBSPACE approach, improves the selection of the importance maps in order to reduce the computational overhead required to achieve global variance reduction - that is, the uniform reduction of variance everywhere in the phase-space. The intended applications are reactor analysis problems where detailed responses for all fuel assemblies are required everywhere in the reactor core. Like FW-CADIS, the SUBSPACE approach utilizes importance maps obtained from deterministic adjoint models to derive automatic weight-window biasing. Unlike FW-CADIS, the SUBSPACE approach does not employ flux-based weighting of the adjoint source term. Instead, it utilizes pseudoresponses generated with random weights to help identify the correlations between the importance maps that could be used to reduce the computational time required for global variance reduction. Numerical experiments, serving as proof of principle, are presented to compare the SUBSPACE and FW-CADIS approaches in terms of the global reduction in standard deviation and the associated figures of merit for representative nuclear reactor assembly and core models.