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Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
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2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott 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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BREAKING NEWS: Trump issues executive orders to overhaul nuclear industry
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C. J. Hah, T. J. Downar
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 121 | Number 3 | December 1995 | Pages 405-415
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE95-A24143
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The application of nodal equivalence theory (NET) in multigroup diffusion theory has required the use of “discontinuity factors” (DFs) to account for the homogenization errors that are inherent in all coarse-mesh nodal methods. Traditionally, DFs have been applied directly to the nodal matrix equations as multipliers to the group constants. For most problems of practical interest, the application of DFs has not led to the divergence of the iterative methods used to solve the discretized nodal equations. However, because of the large discontinuity factors resulting from the steep flux gradients in the modular high-temperature gas reactor, the inner and upscatter iterations failed to converge, motivating an investigation into alternative methods for applying NET. In this work, the augmented source method (ASM) for applying NET to the nodal expansion method is introduced. External surface sources at a node boundary are introduced to account for the homogenization errors thereby preserving the original matrix properties for which convergence of iterative methods is guaranteed. The ASM produced converged solutions for any magnitude of DFs and reproduced the reference solution when the augmented sources were constructed from the reference quantities. The application of the ASM to the core depletion calculation demonstrated the use of various approximations for the augmented source. An augmented source, which was constant during the burnup cycle, resulted in an improved solution in which the eigenvalue error was reduced by a factor of 6 compared with the nodal solution without DFs.