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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Powering the future: How the DOE is fueling nuclear fuel cycle research and development
As global interest in nuclear energy surges, the United States must remain at the forefront of research and development to ensure national energy security, advance nuclear technologies, and promote international cooperation on safety and nonproliferation. A crucial step in achieving this is analyzing how funding and resources are allocated to better understand how to direct future research and development. The Department of Energy has spearheaded this effort by funding hundreds of research projects across the country through the Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP). This initiative has empowered dozens of universities to collaborate toward a nuclear-friendly future.
Y. A. Chao, N. Tsoulfanidis
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 121 | Number 2 | October 1995 | Pages 202-209
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE95-A28558
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The conventional transverse integration method of deriving nodal diffusion equations does not satisfactorily apply to hexagonal nodes. The transversely integrated nodal diffusion equation contains nonphysical singular terms, and the features that appear in the nodal equations for rectangular nodes cannot be retained for hexagonal ones. A method is presented that conformally maps a hexagonal node to a rectangular node before the transverse integration is applied so that the resulting nodal equations are formally analogous to the ones for rectangular nodes without the appearance of additional singular terms. Utilizing the invariance of the Laplacian diffusion operator under conformal mappings, it is shown that the diffusion equation for a homogeneous hexagonal node can be transformed to the diffusion equation for an inhomogeneous rectangular node. The inhomogeneity comes in through a smoothly varying mapping scale function, which depends only on the geometry. The steps of conformal mapping from a hexagonal node to a rectangular node are given, and the mapping scale function is derived, evaluated, and applied to nodal equation derivations.