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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!
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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.
Yunzhao Li, E. E. Lewis, Micheal A. Smith, Hongchun Wu, Liangzhi Cao
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 179 | Number 1 | January 2015 | Pages 42-58
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE13-103
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Combinations of three approaches are examined as options to replace the algorithms presently employed in the variational nodal code VARIANT. They are preconditioned Generalized Minimal Residual (GMRES) algorithms, parallelism in energy, and Wielandt acceleration. Together with partitioned matrix and Gauss-Seidel (GS) preconditioners, two GMRES algorithms are formulated to replace the upscattering iteration and facilitate energy parallelism and Wielandt acceleration. The GMRES algorithms are tested on two-dimensional thermal and fast reactor diffusion problems. The two GMRES algorithms yield higher efficiencies in energy group parallelization and Wielandt acceleration than simple parallelization of the existing GS algorithm. With preconditioning the GMRES algorithms reduce the total computing time by a factor of 2 to 4 and in some cases by a factor of >10. A multilevel iteration optimization scheme is investigated that automatically adjusts the relative error tolerance of the inner iterations according to the estimated convergence rate of the corresponding outer iterations and updates the Wielandt shift magnitude as the calculations progress. Numerical results based on large two-dimensional thermal and fast reactor diffusion problems demonstrate that automated optimization of the multilevel iterative processes reduces iteration numbers by as much as an order of magnitude.