ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
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
Conference on Nuclear Training and Education: A Biennial International Forum (CONTE 2025)
February 3–6, 2025
Amelia Island, FL|Omni Amelia Island Resort
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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Christmas Night
Twas the night before Christmas when all through the houseNo electrons were flowing through even my mouse.
All devices were plugged in by the chimney with careWith the hope that St. Nikola Tesla would share.
Elanchezhian Somasundaram, Todd S. Palmer
Nuclear Technology | Volume 193 | Number 3 | March 2016 | Pages 391-403
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NT15-43
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Local Importance Function Transform (LIFT) method is a sophisticated automated variance-reduction technique for Monte Carlo simulation of radiation transport problems. In previous publications, the LIFT method was tested on geometrically simple problems with a coarse representation of radiation energy dependence, and the performance of the method was found to be promising when compared to traditional weight windows–based variance-reduction techniques. In this work, the LIFT method is tested on a spatially complex benchmark test problem with a more realistic representation of energy dependence (50 energy groups) and heterogeneous materials. The performance of the method in comparison with a CADIS (Consistent Adjoint Driven Importance Sampling)–based weight windows method and an analog Monte Carlo simulation is studied. A multigroup Monte Carlo code that utilizes portions of the framework of the deterministic tool Attila has been developed such that the overhead time in implementing the variance-reduction techniques is minimal. The Monte Carlo simulations are performed on an arbitrary tetrahedral mesh created by the mesh generator in Attila. A method to transfer the deterministic solution generated on a finer mesh to a coarser mesh for implementing the hybrid simulations has been developed, and the results are quantified.