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
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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 2024
Jan 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2024
Nuclear Technology
May 2024
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Commercial nuclear innovation "new space" age
In early 2006, a start-up company launched a small rocket from a tiny island in the Pacific. It exploded, showering the island with debris. A year later, a second launch attempt sent a rocket to space but failed to make orbit, burning up in the atmosphere. Another year brought a third attempt—and a third failure. The following month, in September 2008, the company used the last of its funds to launch a fourth rocket. It reached orbit, making history as the first privately funded liquid-fueled rocket to do so.
Isao Murata, Detlef Filges, Frank Goldenbaum
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 159 | Number 3 | July 2008 | Pages 273-283
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE159-273
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new importance estimation method, which is based on the adjoint function definition, has been proposed especially for the weight window (WW) technique of MCNP, which is well known as one of the most powerful variance-reduction techniques in Monte Carlo codes. The method employs the scattering point base importance estimation, unlike the WW generator (WWG) of MCNP for the point detector function. Every scattering point has an adjoint contribution to the detector, with which a space-, energy-, and angle-dependent importance for WW could be estimated. From the numerical test calculations, the basic performance was confirmed to be better than WWG by comparing figure-of-merit values. It would be expected that the performance of WWG would be well improved by using the present method instead of the current MCNP routine of accumulating the detector contribution for the F5 tally. The presently proposed method would be a strong tool to estimate the importance applicable to various variance-reduction techniques in Monte Carlo codes.