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Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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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
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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.
Tuomas Viitanen, Jaakko Leppänen
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 180 | Number 2 | June 2015 | Pages 209-223
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE14-46
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper discusses the generation of temperature majorant cross sections, the type of cross sections required by two separate techniques related to Monte Carlo neutron tracking, namely, the Doppler-broadening rejection correction (DBRC) and target motion sampling (TMS) temperature treatment methods. In the generation of these cross sections, the theoretically infinite range of thermal motion must be artificially limited by applying some sort of a cutoff condition, which affects both the accuracy and the performance of the calculations. In this paper, a revised approach for limiting thermal motion is first introduced, and then, optimal cutoff conditions are determined for both the traditional majorant, commonly used in DBRC implementations and old implementations of the TMS method, and the revised majorant. Using the revised type of temperature majorant cross sections increases the performance of the TMS method slightly, but no practical difference is observed with the DBRC method. It is also discovered that in ordinary reactor physical calculations, the cutoff conditions originally adopted from the SIGMA1 Doppler-broadening code can be significantly relieved without compromising the accuracy of the results. By updating the cutoff conditions for majorant generation, the CPU time requirement of Serpent 2.1.17 is reduced by 8% to 23% in TMS calculations and by 1% to 6% in problems involving DBRC.