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Division Spotlight
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.
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
Proving DRACO will deliver
The United States is now closer than it has been in over five decades to launching the first nuclear thermal rocket into space, thanks to DRACO—the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Orbit.
Lubomír Bureš, Stefano Caruso
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 191 | Number 1 | July 2018 | Pages 66-84
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2018.1442059
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Knowledge of the radionuclide inventory in spent nuclear fuel is important for back-end operations such as fuel transport and storage, but it is also relevant for the postclosure safety case for a deep geological repository. Extensive depletion calculations using neutron transport solvers can be time consuming and resource intensive in the case of characterization of a large number of fuel assemblies. Issues of computational demand are further amplified when the inventory of only a single pin from the assembly is desired.
A new approach to speeding up the computational time without significant loss of accuracy is proposed in this work, consisting of simplification of the modeled geometry by means of stochastic optimization. The development of this novel methodology, the Acropolis methodology, is described in detail in this paper. Additionally, extensive benchmark and validation exercises were carried out to present and discuss the advantages and limitations of the proposed method.