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Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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
Direct waste transfer process quickens at Savannah River Site
The Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management’s liquid waste contractor at the Savannah River Site this month marked the first direct transfer of decontaminated waste from the Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) to the Saltstone Production Facility (SPF). This is a new step in optimizing waste processing, according to the DOE.
Ding She, Ang Zhu, Kan Wang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 175 | Number 3 | November 2013 | Pages 259-265
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE12-48
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Burnup calculations consider the time dependence of the material composition or isotope inventory, which has important influence on the neutronic properties of a nuclear reactor. An essential part of burnup calculations is to solve the burnup equations, which can be approximately treated as a first-order linear system and can be solved by means of matrix exponential methods. However, because of the large decay constants of short-lived nuclides, the coefficient matrix of the burnup equations has a large norm and a vast range of spectra. Consequently, it is quite difficult to directly compute the matrix exponential using conventional methods such as the truncated Taylor expansion and the Pade approximation. Recently, the Chebyshev rational approximation method (CRAM), which is based on rational functions on the complex plane, has shown the capability to deal with this problem. In this paper an alternative method based on the generalized Laguerre polynomials is proposed to compute the exponential of the burnup matrix. Against CRAM, the Laguerre polynomial approximation method (LPAM) has simple recursions for obtaining the coefficients in any order, and all the computations are real arithmetic. A point burnup case and a pin-cell burnup case are calculated for validation, and results show that LPAM is promising for burnup calculations.