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.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 8–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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
Oct 2025
Jul 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
November 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
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.
R. J. Neuhold
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 43 | Number 1 | January 1971 | Pages 74-86
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE71-A21248
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The weighted residual procedure was used to expand the fast reactor space-energy synthesis approach to include multiple (discontinuous) weighting functions with continuous trial functions. In the past (except for discontinuous trial function applications) the number of weighting functions was chosen equal to the number of trial functions, and all region and current residuals were weighted with the same set of weights. In this article, each region residual and each boundary residual is separately weighted. The region residuals are weighted with region reaction rates, and the current boundary conditions are weighted with a boundary “reaction rate.” Numerical results are presented for a typical two-region (core and blanket) fast reactor in which multiple reaction rate weighting and a special use of reaction rate weighting are compared with previously used fast reactor space-energy synthesis weighting forms. The results, based on using realistic trial functions, show that multiple reaction rate weighting is generally better than Galerkin or reaction rate weighting, and approaches or exceeds the accuracy of adjoint weighting for the cases examined. Although the group balance or weighted group balance weighting is improved with an application of reaction rate weighting, preliminary results based on an extension of the two techniques to multiple reaction rate weighted group balance were not encouraging. Applications of various weighting functions using poor trial functions show the necessity of realistic trial spectra if weighting functions are to be improved. Multiple reaction rate weighting maintains the “easy to use” feature of Galerkin weighting with considerable potential for multiregion error reduction.