ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2024
Jan 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
May 2024
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Zap Energy hits 37-million-degree electron temperatures in compact fusion device
Zap Energy announced April 23 that it has reached 1-3 keV plasma electron temperatures—roughly the equivalent of 11 to 37 million degrees Celsius—using its sheared-flow-stabilized Z-pinch approach to fusion. Reaching temperatures above that of the sun’s core (which is 10 million degrees Celsius temperature) is just one hurdle required before any fusion confinement concept can realistically pursue net gain and fusion energy.
Ahmad K. Al-Basheer, Glenn E. Sjoden, Monica Ghita
Nuclear Technology | Volume 169 | Number 3 | March 2010 | Pages 252-262
Technical Paper | Radiation Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-A9377
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Dosimetry problems inherently involve dose determinations among widely varying materials and densities, and may require complex, detailed investigations of the angular, spatial, and energy behavior of the applied radiation transporting throughout the simulation geometry. Traditionally, Monte Carlo codes have been implemented in solving these types of problems using voxelized geometries and phantoms. The motivation of this work is to investigate the discretization requirements for deterministic radiation transport simulations for these problems via direct solutions of the linear Boltzmann transport equation, focusing on the discrete ordinates (SN) method. The SN method can yield accurate global solutions, provided the inherent discretizations among the angular, spatial, and energy domains properly represent problem physics. In this paper, the SN approach is implemented using a three-dimensional (3-D) 60Co photon transport simulation to highlight the critical issues encountered in performing deterministic photon simulations in dosimetry problems. Calculations were performed using the PENTRAN parallel SN code to obtain a 3-D distribution of flux and dose computed using a collisional kerma approximation. For an acceptable result, we determined that a minimum angular Legendre-Chebychev quadrature of S32 with P3 anisotropy is required, with block-adaptive meshes on the order of 1 cm, even in air regions, implemented with an adaptive differencing scheme (implemented in the PENTRAN code) to yield optimal solution convergence. Also, photon cross-section libraries should be carefully evaluated for the problem studied; for our test problem, the BUGLE-96 photon library yielded the closest results to Monte Carlo (MCNP5) among those tested. Overall, this work details the levels of discretization involved in performing deterministic computations in dosimetry problems and will be useful in enabling future efforts to perform rapid deterministic computations of phantom doses.
