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.
Division Spotlight
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver 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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
May 2025
Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
Taro Ueki
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 158 | Number 1 | January 2008 | Pages 15-27
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE08-A2735
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
On-the-fly diagnostics of the number of particles per iteration cycle in iterated-source Monte Carlo computation, which output diagnostic measures for a given spatial resolution of binning cells as iteration cycles progress, have been studied using relative entropy and chi-square distance. A source ratio vector is defined whose components are the ratio of the sources of adjacent iteration cycles at the individual binning cells. This enables one to define a problem-independent reference vector based on the integral equation representation of the static eigenvalue problem of particle multiplication. These vectors are normalized so that they represent discrete probability distribution. The relative entropy of the source ratio vector and the weighted difference between the relative entropy and the chi-square distance of the source ratio vector, all with respect to the reference vector, have been shown to be effective measures of particle population. Numerical examples presented include the initial core of a pressurized water reactor (PWR), the vault of PWR fresh fuel bundles, and the Whitesides' keff-of-the-world problem.