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
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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
Dec 2025
Jul 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
January 2026
Nuclear Technology
December 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
November 2025
Latest News
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.
J. E. Cockayne, K. O. Ott
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 43 | Number 2 | February 1971 | Pages 159-172
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE71-A21264
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new zero-dimensional procedure was developed for the calculation of neutron spectra in a fast reactor. The procedure yields a good approximation to the spectrum at a given “point” in a fast reactor rather than for a larger “region.” Therefore, the procedure is especially suitable for the calculation of spectra in transition areas where other methods are very inaccurate. These close approximations to actually occurring spectra have been found to be good trial functions for the space-energy synthesis method of approximately solving the multigroup equations. The new procedure is based on an approximate flux from a 2-mode synthesis solution; high accuracy is not required for this initial flux. A single-group diffusion kernel is applied as weight function in the derivation of the zero-dimensional multigroup equations for the spectrum at a given point. Application of this procedure for two or more points yields an excellent set of trial functions for a subsequent space-energy synthesis calculation. Normally, M modes (with M > 2) are used in the second synthesis calculation. The complete synthesis procedure is therefore called “successive 2-M mode space-energy synthesis.” Application of a successive 2–3 mode synthesis to a two-region fast reactor model yielded very high accuracy when compared with a numerical multigroup (diffusion) reference solution. Two substantially different 2-mode solutions used as basis for the calculation of the new set of trial spectra gave approximately the same final accuracy. The high accuracy and the small computation time give the successive synthesis method a good chance to compete with the multigroup method either by a reduction in computation time or by an increase in accuracy through a more detailed description of the energy dependence.