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Accelerator Applications
The division was organized to promote the advancement of knowledge of the use of particle accelerator technologies for nuclear and other applications. It focuses on production of neutrons and other particles, utilization of these particles for scientific or industrial purposes, such as the production or destruction of radionuclides significant to energy, medicine, defense or other endeavors, as well as imaging and diagnostics.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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
G7 pledges support for nuclear at Italy meeting
The Group of Seven (G7) recommitted its support for nuclear energy in the countries that opt to use it at a Ministerial Meeting on Climate in Italy last month.
In a statement following the April meeting, the group committed to support multilateral efforts to strengthen the resilience of nuclear supply chains, referencing the goal set by 25 countries during last year’s COP28 climate conference in Dubai to triple global nuclear generating capacity by 2050.
S. Stimpson, T. Pandya, K. Royston, B. Collins, A. Godfrey
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 4 | April 2021 | Pages 582-595
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1770557
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors is developing the Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications (VERA), and the MPACT code, which is the primary deterministic neutron transport solver in VERA, provides sub-pin level flux and power distributions as part of full-scale cycle depletion and analysis. In such calculations, an important aspect is the radial reflector treatment. To improve the fidelity of the radial reflector treatment, MPACT was extended to approximate the modeling of the reactor’s structural components such as the core shroud, barrel, neutron pads, and vessel. This work explores several modeling configurations with varying levels of fidelity and computational burden and assesses the importance of modeling fidelity on the eigenvalue and pin power distribution.
Two two-dimensional (2-D) problems were analyzed to assess the impact on eigenvalue and pin power distributions with low-fidelity, coarse square cell reflector representations: (1) a Watts Bar Nuclear Plant Unit 1 (WBN1) quarter-core slice with depletion and (2) an AP1000 quarter-core slice. The analyses showed that the effect on eigenvalue is fairly small, but the effect on pin power is more pronounced, especially locally in the assemblies closest to the periphery, where the maximum pin power difference is nearly 3.5% in the AP1000 case. Two additional 2-D problems were used to assess the comparison between the low-fidelity coarse square cell treatment and a high-fidelity geometric representation that uses subpin material specification: (1) the same WBN1 quarter-core slice and (2) a representative model of the NuScale small modular reactor (SMR), which features a solid reflector design with moderator holes. These results demonstrate that even a coarse, low-fidelity representation adequately captures the necessary simulation characteristics. Last, these capabilities were applied to the 2-D WBN1 quarter-core depletion to assess the impact on vessel fluence using VeraShift. From adjoint calculations, pins along the periphery were observed to be of highest importance for fluence calculation, so the impact of the reflector representation in MPACT could theoretically substantially affect the predicted result. However, it was observed that the change in pin powers along the periphery minimally impacts the maximum vessel fluence with a difference within the statistical uncertainty but provides terrific insight on the sensitivity of the peripheral pins.