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Division Spotlight
Radiation Protection & Shielding
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.
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
Can hydrogen be the transportation fuel in an otherwise nuclear economy?
Let’s face it: The global economy should be powered primarily by nuclear power. And it probably will by the end of this century, with a still-significant assist from renewables and hydro. Once nuclear systems are dominant, the costs come down to where gas is now; and when carbon emissions are reduced to a small portion of their present state, it will become obvious that most other sources are only good in niche settings. I mean, why use small modular reactors to load-follow when they can just produce that power instead of buffering it?
Zeyun Wu, Qiong Zhang, Hany Abdel-Khalik
Nuclear Technology | Volume 180 | Number 3 | December 2012 | Pages 372-382
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the Initial Release of MCNP6 / Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT12-A15350
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new variant of a hybrid Monte Carlo-deterministic approach for simulating particle transport problems is presented and compared to the SCALE FW-CADIS approach. The new approach, denoted as the SUBSPACE approach, improves the selection of the importance maps in order to reduce the computational overhead required to achieve global variance reduction - that is, the uniform reduction of variance everywhere in the phase-space. The intended applications are reactor analysis problems where detailed responses for all fuel assemblies are required everywhere in the reactor core. Like FW-CADIS, the SUBSPACE approach utilizes importance maps obtained from deterministic adjoint models to derive automatic weight-window biasing. Unlike FW-CADIS, the SUBSPACE approach does not employ flux-based weighting of the adjoint source term. Instead, it utilizes pseudoresponses generated with random weights to help identify the correlations between the importance maps that could be used to reduce the computational time required for global variance reduction. Numerical experiments, serving as proof of principle, are presented to compare the SUBSPACE and FW-CADIS approaches in terms of the global reduction in standard deviation and the associated figures of merit for representative nuclear reactor assembly and core models.