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
2026 Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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
Dec 2025
Jul 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
December 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
November 2025
Latest News
Perpetual Atomics, QSA Global produce Am fuel for nuclear space power
U.K.-based Perpetual Atomics and U.S.-based QSA Global claim to have achieved a major step forward in processing americium dioxide to fuel radioisotope power systems used in space missions. Using an industrially scalable process, the companies said they have turned americium into stable, large-scale ceramic pellets that can be directly integrated into sealed sources for radioisotope power systems, including radioisotope heater units (RHUs) and radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs).
Hiroshi Mitani
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 51 | Number 2 | June 1973 | Pages 180-188
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE51-180
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A higher order perturbation formula for calculating changes in the reactivity up to a desired order in concise form is given; the formula uses the iterative technique well known in quantum mechanics and in the neutron life-cycle method. This procedure is possible only when the adjoint flux in the unperturbed system is used as the weighting function. The higher order perturbation formula contains the interaction between the perturbation inserted and its surrounding medium, but it consists only of the integration over the perturbed region. Numerical calculations up to the third-order perturbation show that the first-order perturbation technique gives a low value for the reactivity worths of fission, absorption, and scattering materials; further, the n’th-order perturbation is proportional to the n’th power of the concentration of an inserted perturbation.