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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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A wave of new U.S.-U.K. deals ahead of Trump’s state visit
President Trump will arrive in the United Kingdom this week for a state visit that promises to include the usual pomp and ceremony alongside the signing of a landmark new agreement on U.S.-U.K. nuclear collaboration.
Tengfei Zhang, Yongping Wang, E. E. Lewis, M. A. Smith, W. S. Yang, Hongchun Wu
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 188 | Number 2 | November 2017 | Pages 160-174
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2017.1350002
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A three-dimensional variational nodal method (VNM) is presented for pressurized water reactor core calculations without fuel-moderator homogenization. The nodal functional is presented and discretized to obtain response matrix equations. Within the nodes, finite elements in the x-y plane and orthogonal polynomials in z are used to approximate the spatial flux distribution. On the lateral interfaces, orthogonal polynomials are employed. On the axial interfaces, the finite elements facilitate a spatially accurate current representation that has proven to be a challenge for the method of characteristics–based two-dimensional/one-dimensional approximations which typically rely on spatial homogenization. The angular discretization utilizes an even-parity integral method within the nodes, with the integrals evaluated using high-order Chebyshev-Legendre cubature. On the lateral and axial interfaces, low-order spherical harmonics (Pn) are augmented by high-order Pn expansions to which quasi-reflected conditions are applied. With quasi-reflected conditions, the solution converges to the high-order Pn solution for an infinite lattice of identical cells with no gradient, while the low-order Pn expansions handle global gradients in both the radial and axial directions. The method is implemented in the PANX code and applied first to a number of model problems to study convergence of the space-angle approximations and then to the C5G7 benchmark problems. Multigroup Monte Carlo solutions provide reference values for eigenvalues and pin-power distributions.