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Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy
The mission of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy Division (NNPD) is to promote the peaceful use of nuclear technology while simultaneously preventing the diversion and misuse of nuclear material and technology through appropriate safeguards and security, and promotion of nuclear nonproliferation policies. To achieve this mission, the objectives of the NNPD are to: Promote policy that discourages the proliferation of nuclear technology and material to inappropriate entities. Provide information to ANS members, the technical community at large, opinion leaders, and decision makers to improve their understanding of nuclear nonproliferation issues. Become a recognized technical resource on nuclear nonproliferation, safeguards, and security issues. Serve as the integration and coordination body for nuclear nonproliferation activities for the ANS. Work cooperatively with other ANS divisions to achieve these objective nonproliferation policies.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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Why should safeguards by design be a global effort?
Jeremy Whitlock
I can’t think of a more exciting time to be working in nuclear, with the diversity of advanced reactor development and increasing global support for nuclear in sustainable energy planning. But we can’t lose sight of the need to plan for efficient international safeguards at the same time.
Global nuclear deployment has been underpinned since 1970 by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), making it a key customer requirement for governments to demonstrate unequivocally that the technology is not being misused for weapons development.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has helped verify this commitment for more than 50 years, but it has never safeguarded many of the advanced reactors (and related fuel cycle processes) being developed today.
Kirk Mathews, James Dishaw, Nicholas Wager, Nicholas Prins
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 163 | Number 3 | November 2009 | Pages 191-214
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE163-191
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Our partial-current-transport (PCT) approach uses the partial currents through the faces of cells in a spatial grid as the unknowns in a linear algebra problem. Emission and externally incident currents are the knowns. The coefficient matrix is determined by boundary conditions and transport within cells. Adaptive PCT models include within-cell flux-distribution parameters that are found by distribution iteration (DI). Upon convergence, scalar fluxes are computed. We develop the approach in general and derive (in slab geometry) a fixed-coefficient PCT diffusion method and an adaptive PCT discrete ordinates method. A parallelized direct solver is used for the large but very sparse linear algebra problem that couples all the cells. Matrix inversion is used for the dense but small within-cell problems. These direct solvers eliminate scattering source iteration (SI). Though requiring more storage, much or most of the computational effort is pleasingly parallel, making the method attractive for large parallel machines with large memories. In comparing our slab geometry implementation with PARTISN, we observed that DI used as many or fewer iterations than SI and succeeded where SI failed, whether alone or with diffusion synthetic acceleration or transport synthetic acceleration. We conclude that DI for adaptive PCT holds great promise as an alternative to SI and its accelerators.