ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
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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!
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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.
Kaushik Banerjee, William R. Martin
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 170 | Number 3 | March 2012 | Pages 234-250
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE10-77
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The kernel density estimator (KDE) is used to represent Monte Carlo tallies. Two new neutron flux estimators and their variances are developed, namely the KDE collision and KDE track-length tallies. These new estimators are capable of estimating the flux and its variance at any point within a given domain without any bin structure. The strength of these two estimators is illustrated with numerical examples in one- and two-dimensional geometries. Convergence properties of the KDE estimators are discussed and the KDE estimators are compared with the functional expansion tally (FET) and the conventional histogram tally. The results show that the KDE tallies compare favorably with the FET and histogram tallies with respect to accuracy and convergence rate. Disadvantages of KDE estimators are also discussed, and some future research scopes in this area are identified.
