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 Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
Latest Magazine Issues
Jul 2026
Jan 2026
2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
August 2026
Nuclear Technology
July 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
The deadline arrives: Checking in on the Reactor Pilot Program
On May 23, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14301, “Reforming Nuclear Reactor Testing at the DOE,” which instructed the Department of Energy to create a Reactor Pilot Program (RPP)—a new system in which companies could pursue DOE authorization to build and test their first-of-a-kind nuclear technologies. EO 14301 set an ambitious goal for that program: three reactors achieving criticality by July 4, 2026.
M. C. White, R. C. Little, M. B. Chadwick, P. G. Young, R. E. MacFarlane
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 144 | Number 2 | June 2003 | Pages 174-189
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE144-174
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This is the second of two companion papers. The first paper describes model calculations and nuclear data evaluations of photonuclear reactions on isotopes of C, O, Al, Si, Ca, Fe, Cu, Ta, W, and Pb for incident photon energies up to 150 MeV. This paper describes the steps taken to process these files into transport libraries and to update the Monte Carlo N-Particle (MCNP) and MCNPX radiation transport codes to use tabular photonuclear reaction data. The evaluated photonuclear data files are created in the standard evaluated nuclear data file (ENDF) format. These files must be processed by the NJOY data processing system into A Compact ENDF (ACE) files suitable for radiation transport calculations. MCNP and MCNPX have been modified to use these new data in a self-consistent and fully integrated manner. Verification problems were used at each step along the path to check the integrity of the methodology. The resulting methodology and tools provide a comprehensive system for using photonuclear data in radiation transport calculations. Also described are initial validation simulations used to benchmark several of the photonuclear transport tables.