ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
Feb 2026
Jul 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
February 2026
Nuclear Technology
January 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Uranium prices reach highest level since February 2024
The end-of-January spot price for uranium was $94.28 per pound, according to uranium fuel provider Cameco. That was the highest spot price posted by the company since the $95.00 per pound it listed at the end of February 2024. Spot prices during 2025 ranged from a low of $64.23 per pound at the end of March to a high of $82.63 per pound at the end of September.
Elliott D. Biondo, Paul P. H. Wilson
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 187 | Number 1 | July 2017 | Pages 27-48
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2016.1275848
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In fusion energy systems (FES) neutrons born from burning plasma activate system components. The photon dose rate after shutdown from resulting radionuclides must be quantified. This shutdown dose rate (SDR) is calculated by coupling neutron transport, activation analysis, and photon transport. The size, complexity, and attenuating configuration of FES motivate the use of hybrid Monte Carlo (MC)/deterministic neutron transport. The Multi-Step Consistent Adjoint Driven Importance Sampling (MS-CADIS) method can be used to optimize MC neutron transport for coupled multiphysics problems, including SDR analysis, using deterministic estimates of adjoint flux distributions. When used for SDR analysis, MS-CADIS requires the formulation of an adjoint neutron source that approximates the transmutation process. In this work, transmutation approximations are used to derive a solution for this adjoint neutron source. It is shown that these approximations are reasonably met for typical FES neutron spectra and materials over a range of irradiation scenarios. When these approximations are met, the Groupwise Transmutation (GT)-CADIS method, proposed here, can be used effectively. GT-CADIS is an implementation of the MS-CADIS method for SDR analysis that uses a series of single-energy-group irradiations to calculate the adjoint neutron source. For a simple SDR problem, GT-CADIS provides speedups of 200 100 relative to global variance reduction with the Forward-Weighted (FW)-CADIS method and 9 5 relative to analog. This work shows that GT-CADIS is broadly applicable to FES problems and will significantly reduce the computational resources necessary for SDR analysis.