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The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
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Why should safeguards by design be a global effort?
Jeremy Whitlock
I can’t think of a more exciting time to be working in nuclear, with the diversity of advanced reactor development and increasing global support for nuclear in sustainable energy planning. But we can’t lose sight of the need to plan for efficient international safeguards at the same time.
Global nuclear deployment has been underpinned since 1970 by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), making it a key customer requirement for governments to demonstrate unequivocally that the technology is not being misused for weapons development.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has helped verify this commitment for more than 50 years, but it has never safeguarded many of the advanced reactors (and related fuel cycle processes) being developed today.
Dingkang Zhang, Farzad Rahnema
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 176 | Number 1 | January 2014 | Pages 69-80
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE13-1
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this work, a high-order perturbation method is developed to generate/compute response functions for the coarse mesh transport (COMET) method, which provides whole-core neutron transport solutions to various reactor core types. In this approach, the response functions are first generated at a reference eigenvalue point, and the response functions at an arbitrary eigenvalue are computed as a high-order perturbation from the reference point. The method has been tested at both the lattice level (response function generation) and the core level (whole-core transport calculations). At the lattice level, it is found that the response functions predicted by the perturbation method agree very well with those directly computed by the Monte Carlo method. The average relative difference in the surface-to-surface response functions is 0.29% to 0.46% when the eigenvalue k ranges from 0.6667 to 1.5. In whole-core transport calculations, the COMET calculations using the high-order perturbation method are almost identical to those using the interpolation method. The eigenvalue, assembly, and pin fission densities predicted by COMET agree very well with the MCNP reference solution. This indicates that the high-order perturbation response function generation method can achieve the same accuracy as the interpolation method while significantly improving the computational efficiency of the precomputation phase.