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
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
May 2025
Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
Daniel F. Gill, Yousry Y. Azmy, James S. Warsa, Jeffery D. Densmore
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 168 | Number 1 | May 2011 | Pages 37-58
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE10-01
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Recently, Jacobian-Free Newton-Krylov (JFNK) methods have been used to solve the k-eigenvalue problem in diffusion and transport theories. We propose an improvement to Newton's method (NM) for solving the k-eigenvalue problem in transport theory that avoids costly within-group iterations or iterations over energy groups. We present a formulation of the k-eigenvalue problem where a nonlinear function, whose roots are solutions of the k-eigenvalue problem, is written in terms of a generic fixed-point iteration (FPI). In this way any FPI that solves the k-eigenvalue problem can be accelerated using the Newton approach, including our improved formulation. Calculations with a one-dimensional multigroup SN transport implementation in MATLAB provide a proof of principle and show that convergence to the fundamental mode is feasible. Results generated using a three-dimensional Fortran implementation of several formulations of NM for the well-known Takeda and C5G7-MOX benchmark problems confirm the efficiency of NM for realistic k-eigenvalue calculations and highlight numerous advantages over traditional FPI.