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 Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
Latest Magazine Issues
Aug 2026
Jan 2026
2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
October 2026
Nuclear Technology
September 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
August 2026
Latest News
Front-end nuclear fuel supply cooperation: Turning allied interdependence into strategic advantage
The global nuclear revival, which is fueled by unprecedented demand for firm, affordable, dispatchable power for artificial intelligence and data center build-out, energy security imperatives, and climate commitments, has exposed a structural reality of the Western fuel cycle: No single allied nation currently possesses the full suite of front-end capabilities. From mining through conversion, enrichment, fabrication, and the emerging deconversion and metallization steps required for reactor fuels, capability is distributed across Canada, France, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States (collectively, the “Sapporo Five”), as well as a small group of close partners.
Naoki Sugimura, Akio Yamamoto, Tadashi Ushio, Masaaki Mori, Masato Tabuchi, Tomohiro Endo
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 155 | Number 2 | February 2007 | Pages 276-289
Technical Paper | Mathematics and Computation, Supercomputing, Reactor Physics and Nuclear and Biological Applications | doi.org/10.13182/NSE155-276
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A very rigorous and advanced next-generation neutronics design system, AEGIS (Anisotropic, Extended Geometry, Integrated Neutronics Solver), which is based on the deterministic method, is being developed using advanced computer science technology. The method of characteristics, which has the merit of treating heterogeneous geometry explicitly, is utilized in AEGIS as a neutron transport solver. So, the AEGIS code can explicitly model many types of fuel lattices in both commercial light water reactors (LWRs) and advanced reactors such as Generation IV reactors. The AEGIS code can also treat higher-order anisotropic scattering accurately based on spherical harmonics expansion. To compute a large-scale problem, a nonuniform ray-tracing method is implemented in AEGIS. It utilizes the Gauss-Legendre quadrature weight and the macroband method to decide position and width of ray traces to reduce spatial discretization error efficiently. The transport solution of AEGIS has been verified through various benchmark problems. It was found that the AEGIS code can explicitly treat complicated geometry and can efficiently solve a large-scale problem. These results show that flexibility in handling geometry and the very rigorous neutronics calculation models of AEGIS will contribute to predicting neutronics characteristics accurately, not only for commercial LWRs but also for advanced reactors.