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Division Spotlight
Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
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2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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!
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BREAKING NEWS: Trump issues executive orders to overhaul nuclear industry
The Trump administration issued four executive orders today aimed at boosting domestic nuclear deployment ahead of significant growth in projected energy demand in the coming decades.
During a live signing in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump called nuclear “a hot industry,” adding, “It’s a brilliant industry. [But] you’ve got to do it right. It’s become very safe and environmental.”
Viktoriya V. Kulik, John C. Lee
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 153 | Number 1 | May 2006 | Pages 69-89
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE06-A2596
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The presence of a localized spallation source in an accelerator-driven subcritical system leads to significant spatial variations in the power distribution and invalidates the simple point-kinetics approach. To eliminate higher-harmonics contamination in the detector response and to account properly for spatial and spectral effects in reactivity determination, a method directly combining measurements with numerical simulations of the experimental data is developed through a quasi-static formulation. The method provides space-time correction to a variety of traditional point-kinetics techniques and determines the reactivity essentially independent of the detector position, as long as sufficiently accurate information on the reactor configuration is provided. In the current work, the space-time corrections are derived for two well-known point-kinetics methods: area-ratio technique and -method. Numerical simulations performed with the FX2-TH diffusion theory code along with a space-time analysis of MUSE-4 pulsed source experimental data illustrate the applicability of the proposed methods for the determination of significant subcriticality levels in fast and thermal reactor systems.