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Nuclear Criticality Safety
NCSD provides communication among nuclear criticality safety professionals through the development of standards, the evolution of training methods and materials, the presentation of technical data and procedures, and the creation of specialty publications. In these ways, the division furthers the exchange of technical information on nuclear criticality safety with the ultimate goal of promoting the safe handling of fissionable materials outside reactors.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
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Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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?
Shawn D. Pautz, Tara M. Pandya, Marvin L. Adams
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 169 | Number 3 | November 2011 | Pages 245-261
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE10-30
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The well-known “sweep” algorithm for inverting the streaming-plus-collision term in first-order deterministic radiation transport calculations suffers from parallel scaling issues caused by a lack of concurrency in the spatial dimension along the direction of particle travel. We investigate a new class of parallel algorithms that involves recasting the streaming-plus-collision problem in prefix form and solving via cyclic reduction. This method, although computationally more expensive at low levels of parallelism than the sweep algorithm, offers better theoretical scalability properties. Previous work has demonstrated this approach for one-dimensional calculations; we show how to extend it to multidimensional calculations. Notably, for multiple dimensions it appears that this approach is limited to long-characteristics discretizations; other discretizations cannot be cast in practical prefix form. Computational results on two different massively parallel computer systems demonstrate that both our “forward” and “symmetric” algorithms behave similarly, scaling well to larger degrees of parallelism than sweep-based solvers. We do observe some issues at the highest levels of parallelism (relative to the computer system size) and discuss possible causes. We conclude that this approach shows good potential for future parallel systems but that parallel scalability will depend on the architecture of the communication networks of these systems.