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
Latest Magazine Issues
Mar 2026
Jan 2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
April 2026
Nuclear Technology
February 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Going Nuclear: Notes from the officially unofficial book tour
I work in the analytical labs at one of Europe’s oldest and largest nuclear sites: Sellafield, in northwestern England. I spend my days at the fume hood front, pipette in one hand and radiation probe in the other (and dosimeter pinned to my chest, of course). Outside the lab, I have a second job: I moonlight as a writer and public speaker. My new popular science book—Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World—came out last summer, and it feels like my life has been running at full power ever since.
Haluk Utku, John M. Christenson
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 116 | Number 1 | January 1994 | Pages 55-66
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE94-A21481
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The temporal subdomain method (TSM), based on a spatial finite element formulation, is investigated as a method for the solution of the space-time-dependent multigroup neutron dynamics equations. The spatial aspect of the problem was formulated as an array of finite elements by using a two-dimensional rectangular coordinate system subdivided into contiguous triangular elements. Within each element and within each neutron group, the flux was represented by a linear polynomial. Numerical experiments using a computer program developed during the course of the investigation demonstrated that the method is straightforward to implement and that it produces stable calculations for a wide range of time steps. The stability of the method has been tested for sinusoidal, ramp, and step-change reactivity insertions. The results show that the TSM outperforms most alternating direction implicit methods in the sense that a similar degree of accuracy can be achieved with larger time steps using the same number of nodes. System condition number calculations as a function of node number were also carried out for a series of static eigenvalue calculations to determine the likelihood of error propagation and the difficulty of inverting the global system matrices during the time-dependent calculations.