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
Isotopes & Radiation
Members are devoted to applying nuclear science and engineering technologies involving isotopes, radiation applications, and associated equipment in scientific research, development, and industrial processes. Their interests lie primarily in education, industrial uses, biology, medicine, and health physics. Division committees include Analytical Applications of Isotopes and Radiation, Biology and Medicine, Radiation Applications, Radiation Sources and Detection, and Thermal Power Sources.
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
Mar 2024
Jan 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
April 2024
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
February 2024
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?
Scott W. Mosher, Stephen C. Wilson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 74 | Number 4 | November 2018 | Pages 263-276
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2018.1496691
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Neutronics analyses of the ITER experimental fusion reactor rely on increasingly complex geometry models and estimates of energy-dependent neutron flux and radiation dose-rate distributions generated at ever higher resolutions. There are significant practical challenges with applying the Monte Carlo N-Particle (MCNP) continuous-energy transport code to high-resolution analyses. For models consisting of more than 100 000 surfaces and cells, geometry initialization can take several hours, thus slowing down model integration and transport analysis efforts. In multithreaded simulations, the amount of memory consumed by superimposed mesh tally data increases in proportion to the number of threads. This behavior limits either the tally resolution or the number of processor cores that can be utilized in the simulation. This paper describes algorithmic improvements that were implemented in a modified version of MCNP5 to overcome these limitations. These improvements are referred to as the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Transformative Neutronics (ORNL-TN) upgrade. A comparison of the performance and memory usage of both MCNP5 and ORNL-TN on several relevant fusion neutronics models is presented. In these tests and in actual high-resolution neutronics analyses, ORNL-TN reduces geometry processing times from hours to a few seconds and increases in-memory mesh tally capacity from the order of 108 to 1010 space-energy bins.