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Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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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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AI at work: Southern Nuclear’s adoption of Copilot agents drives fleet forward
Southern Nuclear is leading the charge in artificial intelligence integration, with employee-developed applications driving efficiencies in maintenance, operations, safety, and performance.
The tools span all roles within the company, with thousands of documented uses throughout the fleet, including improved maintenance efficiency, risk awareness in maintenance activities, and better-informed decision-making. The data-intensive process of preparing for and executing maintenance operations is streamlined by leveraging AI to put the right information at the fingertips for maintenance leaders, planners, schedulers, engineers, and technicians.
Burt A. Zolotar
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 31 | Number 2 | February 1968 | Pages 282-294
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE68-A18240
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The one-mode stochastic nuclear reactor model has been proposed by Bell to study fluctuations in neutron populations. The purpose of this model is to allow consistent space and energy corrections to point reactor stochastic results. The model has been extended to also cover fluctuations in captures and fissions. A time-dependent, Monte Carlo computer program has been developed to simulate these fluctuations for a one-velocity bare reactor system and to estimate parameters of the probability distributions. It has been shown that the one-mode model for neutron populations and captures gives excellent agreement with the Monte Carlo results. Both showed a correction of about 50% to the magnitude of the variance predicted by basic point reactor equations. The fission probabilities required a more careful examination, but the Monte Carlo results could be predicted by approximate solutions to the exact stochastic equations. The influence of spatial effects on the properties of persisting and nonpersisting chains in supercritical systems has also been examined. The one-mode model provides important corrections.