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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 8–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Latest News
Japan gets new U for enrichment as global power and fuel plans grow
President Trump is in Japan today, with a visit with new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi on the agenda. Takaichi, who took office just last week as Japan’s first female prime minister, has already spoken in favor of nuclear energy and of accelerating the restart of Japan’s long-shuttered power reactors, as Reuters and others have reported. Much of the uranium to power those reactors will be enriched at Japan’s lone enrichment facility—part of Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd.’s Rokkasho fuel complex—which accepted its first delivery of fresh uranium hexafluoride (UF₆) in 11 years earlier this month.
G. C. Pomraning
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 24 | Number 3 | March 1966 | Pages 291-301
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE66-A17641
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The variational method and region-balance method, both special cases of the more general method of weighted residuals, are each used as the formalism to develop a spatial expansion of the diffusion equation for two problems. These are 1)a spatially dependent spectrum problem for the purpose of computing the self-shielding in the 240Pu resonance and 2) a simple one-dimensional eigenvalue problem. In both instances numerical results indicate that the variational method is more accurate than the region-balance method. Of particular interest is the variational spatial-expansion approach to the eigenvalue problem. This may be a useful method for deriving a set of difference equations for the multigroup diffusion equation in that it should lead to an accurate representation of the flux with a relatively small number of mesh points.
