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Division Spotlight
Isotopes & Radiation
Members are devoted to applying nuclear science and engineering technologies involving isotopes, radiation applications, and associated equipment in scientific research, development, and industrial processes. Their interests lie primarily in education, industrial uses, biology, medicine, and health physics. Division committees include Analytical Applications of Isotopes and Radiation, Biology and Medicine, Radiation Applications, Radiation Sources and Detection, and Thermal Power Sources.
Meeting Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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!
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Latest News
NRC cuts fees by 50 percent for advanced reactor applicants
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has announced it has amended regulations for the licensing, inspection, special projects, and annual fees it will charge applicants and licensees for fiscal year 2025.
S. C. Wilson, R. N. Slaybaugh
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 179 | Number 1 | January 2015 | Pages 22-41
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE13-109
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Continued demand for accurate and computationally efficient transport methods to solve optically thick, fixed-source transport problems has inspired research on variance-reduction (VR) techniques for Monte Carlo (MC). Methods that use deterministic results to create VR maps for MC constitute a dominant branch of this research, with Forward Weighted–Consistent Adjoint Driven Importance Sampling (FW-CADIS) being a particularly successful example. However, locations in which energy and spatial self-shielding are combined, such as thin plates embedded in concrete, challenge FW-CADIS. In these cases the deterministic flux cannot appropriately capture transport behavior, and the associated VR parameters result in high variance in and following the plate. This work presents a new method that improves performance in transport calculations that contain regions of combined space and energy self-shielding without significant impact on the solution quality in other parts of the problem. This method is based on FW-CADIS and applies a Resonance Factor correction to the adjoint source. The impact of the Resonance Factor method is investigated in this work through an example problem. It is clear that this new method dramatically improves performance in terms of lowering the maximum 95% confidence interval relative error and reducing the compute time. Based on this work, we recommend that the Resonance Factor method be used when the accuracy of the solution in the presence of combined space and energy self-shielding is important.