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
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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
Aug 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
August 2025
Latest News
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.
M. A. Smith, G. Palmiotti, E. E. Lewis, N. Tsoulfanidis
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 146 | Number 2 | February 2004 | Pages 141-151
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE146-141
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An integral form of the variational nodal method is formulated, implemented, and tested. The method combines an integral transport treatment of the even-parity flux within the spatial node with an odd-parity spherical harmonics expansion of the Lagrange multipliers at the node interfaces. The response matrices that result from this formulation are compatible with those in the VARIANT code at Argonne National Laboratory. Spatial discretization within each node allows for accurate treatment of homogeneous or heterogeneous node geometries. The integral method is implemented in Cartesian x-y geometry and applied to three benchmark problems. The method's accuracy is compared to that of the standard spherical harmonic formulation of the variational nodal method, and the CPU and memory requirements of the two approaches are compared and contrasted. In general, for calculations requiring higher-order angular approximations, the integral method yields solutions with comparable accuracy while requiring substantially less CPU time and memory than the spherical harmonics approach.