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Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
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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
Strontium: Supply-and-demand success for the DOE’s Isotope Program
The Department of Energy’s Isotope Program (DOE IP) announced last week that it would end its “active standby” capability for strontium-82 production about two decades after beginning production of the isotope for cardiac diagnostic imaging. The DOE IP is celebrating commercialization of the Sr-82 supply chain as “a success story for both industry and the DOE IP.” Now that the Sr-82 market is commercially viable, the DOE IP and its National Isotope Development Center can “reassign those dedicated radioisotope production capacities to other mission needs”—including Sr-89.
Dimitar Altiparmakov, Robert Wiersma
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 182 | Number 4 | April 2016 | Pages 395-416
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE15-28
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The size and the density of the collision probability matrix have been recognized as major deficiencies since the early era of development of the collision probability method. The computing time of the matrix inversion is proportional to the third degree of the number of unknowns per group and increases rapidly with the increase of the problem size. This is a severe limitation that restricts the capabilities of the method and makes it inapplicable to large-size neutron transport problems. This paper presents a new solution method that overcomes these deficiencies and extends the capabilities of the collision probability approximation. To reduce the matrix inversion time, a block partition is applied, and the solution is obtained by block iteration. Owing to the partition, the method is suitable for parallel calculations on contemporary computers. To illustrate the potential advantages, the following three groups of calculations are presented. In the first group, results of sequential calculations reveal the advantage over traditional methods of direct solution and point iteration. In the second group, memory shared parallelism results present the speedup that can be achieved in solving medium-size problems on a standard multicore desktop computer. In the third group, distributed memory calculations show an example of the solution of a large-size two-dimensional model problem of a heavy water power reactor invoking 100 thousand unknowns per group.