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Decommissioning & Environmental Sciences
The mission of the Decommissioning and Environmental Sciences (DES) Division is to promote the development and use of those skills and technologies associated with the use of nuclear energy and the optimal management and stewardship of the environment, sustainable development, decommissioning, remediation, reutilization, and long-term surveillance and maintenance of nuclear-related installations, and sites. The target audience for this effort is the membership of the Division, the Society, and the public at large.
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International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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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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Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
Bernadette L. Kirk, Yousry Y. Azmy
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 111 | Number 1 | May 1992 | Pages 57-65
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE92-A23923
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The one-group, steady-state neutron diffusion equation in two-dimensional Cartesian geometry is solved using the nodal integral method. The discrete variable equations comprise loosely coupled sets of equations representing the nodal balance of neutrons, as well as neutron current continuity along rows or columns of computational cells. An iterative algorithm that is more suitable for solving large problems concurrently is derived based on the decomposition of the spatial domain and is accelerated using successive overrelaxation. This algorithm is very well suited for parallel computers, especially since the spatial domain decomposition occurs naturally, so that the number of iterations required for convergence does not depend on the number of processors participating in the calculation. Implementation of our algorithm on the Intel iPSC/2 hypercube and Sequent Balance 8000 parallel computers is presented, and measured speedup and efficiency for test problems are reported. The results suggest that the efficiency of the hypercube quickly deteriorates when many processors are used, while the Sequent Balance retains very high efficiency for a comparable number of participating processors. This leads to the conjecture that message-passing parallel computers are not as well suited for this algorithm as shared-memory machines.