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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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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Powering the future: How the DOE is fueling nuclear fuel cycle research and development
As global interest in nuclear energy surges, the United States must remain at the forefront of research and development to ensure national energy security, advance nuclear technologies, and promote international cooperation on safety and nonproliferation. A crucial step in achieving this is analyzing how funding and resources are allocated to better understand how to direct future research and development. The Department of Energy has spearheaded this effort by funding hundreds of research projects across the country through the Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP). This initiative has empowered dozens of universities to collaborate toward a nuclear-friendly future.
Taro Ueki, Forrest B. Brown, D. Kent Parsons, Drew E. Kornreich
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 145 | Number 3 | November 2003 | Pages 279-290
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE03-04
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The cycle-to-cycle correlation (autocorrelation) in Monte Carlo criticality calculations is analyzed concerning the dominance ratio of fission kernels. The mathematical analysis focuses on how the eigenfunctions of a fission kernel decay if operated on by the cycle-to-cycle error propagation operator of the Monte Carlo stationary source distribution. The analytical results obtained can be summarized as follows: When the dominance ratio of a fission kernel is close to unity, autocorrelation of the k-effective tallies is weak and may be negligible, while the autocorrelation of the source distribution is strong and decays slowly. The practical implication is that when one analyzes a critical reactor with a large dominance ratio by Monte Carlo methods, the confidence interval estimation of the fission rate and other quantities at individual locations must account for the strong autocorrelation. Numerical results are presented for sample problems with a dominance ratio of 0.85-0.99, where Shannon and relative entropies are utilized to exclude the influence of initial nonstationarity.