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Division Spotlight
Accelerator Applications
The division was organized to promote the advancement of knowledge of the use of particle accelerator technologies for nuclear and other applications. It focuses on production of neutrons and other particles, utilization of these particles for scientific or industrial purposes, such as the production or destruction of radionuclides significant to energy, medicine, defense or other endeavors, as well as imaging and diagnostics.
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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
PPPL study points to better fusion plasma control
The combination of two previously known methods for managing plasma conditions can result in enhanced control of plasma in a fusion reactor, according to a simulation performed by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.
Amelia Trainer, Benoit Forget
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 8 | August 2023 | Pages 1873-1886
Technical papers from: PHYSOR 2022 | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2162302
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Accurate representation of thermal neutron scattering in Monte Carlo transport simulations requires that the molecular vibrations of the target material be accounted for. Historically, this has been achieved by precomputing large multidimensional tables that are a function of temperature and the cosine of the scattering angle, as well as incoming and outgoing neutron energy. Most commonly used sampling techniques for thermal neutron scattering rely on large multidimensional tables, where higher resolution results in an increase in required memory and attempts to reduce memory can result in grid coarseness errors. An alternative sampling method is introduced here that is a significant departure from precomputed tables and instead relies on a more physical model of the scattering behavior. The phonon sampling method classifies neutron scattering events by the number of phonons excited/de-excited during the scattering collision. In doing so, energy exchange may be obtained via rejection sampling, and an analytical representation of the momentum exchange is obtained. This sampling method has been tested on graphite, yttrium hydride, and uranium nitride, and preliminary implementation of the phonon sampling method shows accurate results for angular and energy distributions, though resulting in up to a 40% slowdown in overall calculation time. This notable slowdown is countered, however, by a large reduction in storage (over 99% reduction compared to standard multidimensional tables).