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Materials Science & Technology
The objectives of MSTD are: promote the advancement of materials science in Nuclear Science Technology; support the multidisciplines which constitute it; encourage research by providing a forum for the presentation, exchange, and documentation of relevant information; promote the interaction and communication among its members; and recognize and reward its members for significant contributions to the field of materials science in nuclear technology.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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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Latest News
EPA issues final rule regulating “forever chemicals”
The Environmental Protection Agency announced that it will issue a rule aimed at limiting public exposure to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). The final rule will designate two widely used PFAS chemicals, perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS), as hazardous substances under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), also known as Superfund.
According to the EPA, both PFOA and PFOS meet the statutory criteria for designation as hazardous substances.
S. C. Wilson, R. N. Slaybaugh
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 179 | Number 1 | January 2015 | Pages 22-41
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE13-109
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Continued demand for accurate and computationally efficient transport methods to solve optically thick, fixed-source transport problems has inspired research on variance-reduction (VR) techniques for Monte Carlo (MC). Methods that use deterministic results to create VR maps for MC constitute a dominant branch of this research, with Forward Weighted–Consistent Adjoint Driven Importance Sampling (FW-CADIS) being a particularly successful example. However, locations in which energy and spatial self-shielding are combined, such as thin plates embedded in concrete, challenge FW-CADIS. In these cases the deterministic flux cannot appropriately capture transport behavior, and the associated VR parameters result in high variance in and following the plate. This work presents a new method that improves performance in transport calculations that contain regions of combined space and energy self-shielding without significant impact on the solution quality in other parts of the problem. This method is based on FW-CADIS and applies a Resonance Factor correction to the adjoint source. The impact of the Resonance Factor method is investigated in this work through an example problem. It is clear that this new method dramatically improves performance in terms of lowering the maximum 95% confidence interval relative error and reducing the compute time. Based on this work, we recommend that the Resonance Factor method be used when the accuracy of the solution in the presence of combined space and energy self-shielding is important.