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Division Spotlight
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
Meeting Spotlight
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
Argonne to investigate Pu chemistry to aid Hanford cleanup
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory are investigating the details of plutonium chemistry with the goal of aiding the cleanup of the Hanford Site in Washington state. For more than 40 years, reactors located at Hanford produced plutonium for America’s defense program, resulting in millions of gallons of liquid radioactive and chemical waste.
Tuomas Viitanen, Jaakko Leppänen
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 177 | Number 1 | May 2014 | Pages 77-89
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE13-37
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The target motion sampling (TMS) temperature treatment technique, previously known as “explicit treatment of target motion,” is a stochastic method for taking the effect of thermal motion on reaction rates into account on-the-fly during Monte Carlo neutron tracking. The method is based on sampling target velocities at each collision site and dealing with the collisions in the target-at-rest frame using cross sections below the actual temperature of the nuclide or, originally, 0 K. Previous results have shown that transport with the original implementation of the TMS method requires about two to four times more CPU time than conventional transport methods, depending on the case. In the present paper, it is observed that the overhead factor may increase even above 10 in cases involving burned fuel. To make the method more practical for everyday use, some optimization is required. This paper discusses a TMS optimization technique in which the temperatures of the basis cross sections are elevated above 0 K. Comparisons show that the TMS method is able to reproduce the NJOY-based reference results within statistical accuracy, both with and without the newly implemented optimization technique. In the specific test cases, the optimization saved 35% to 83% of the calculation time, depending on the case.