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The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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Latest News
Commercial nuclear innovation "new space" age
In early 2006, a start-up company launched a small rocket from a tiny island in the Pacific. It exploded, showering the island with debris. A year later, a second launch attempt sent a rocket to space but failed to make orbit, burning up in the atmosphere. Another year brought a third attempt—and a third failure. The following month, in September 2008, the company used the last of its funds to launch a fourth rocket. It reached orbit, making history as the first privately funded liquid-fueled rocket to do so.
Pietro Mosca, Claude Mounier, Richard Sanchez, Gilles Arnaud
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 167 | Number 1 | January 2011 | Pages 40-60
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE10-10
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Users' demands for multigroup transport calculations are wide and diverse, encompassing routine, rough, and fast calculations as well as very precise simulations. For these reasons, the use of accurate and efficient multigroup cross-section libraries is needed. In this work, we present an adaptive energy mesh constructor (AEMC) that builds a multigroup mesh from predefined requisites of precision and calculation time. For a given self-shielding model and number of groups, AEMC looks for the optimal bounds of a multigroup mesh that minimizes the errors of the multigroup transport solutions for a predefined set of infinite homogeneous medium problems. We have applied this methodology to define two energy meshes for fast sodium reactor applications: a 600-group mesh associated with an extension of the Livolant-Jeanpierre self-shielding method and a 1200-group mesh based on subgroup self-shielding. Tests in homogeneous media prove that the multigroup solutions are almost equivalent to Monte Carlo simulations. Simplified one-dimensional transport calculations confirm the accuracy of the 1200-group mesh and show that this mesh provides a precision similar to that obtained with the well-validated 1968-group ECCO mesh. The same tests reveal that the 600-group mesh optimized for subgroup self-shielding offers a good compromise between simulation time and precision.