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Division Spotlight
Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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
Commercial nuclear innovation "new space" age
In early 2006, a start-up company launched a small rocket from a tiny island in the Pacific. It exploded, showering the island with debris. A year later, a second launch attempt sent a rocket to space but failed to make orbit, burning up in the atmosphere. Another year brought a third attempt—and a third failure. The following month, in September 2008, the company used the last of its funds to launch a fourth rocket. It reached orbit, making history as the first privately funded liquid-fueled rocket to do so.
J. E. M. Saxby, Anil K. Prinja, M. D. Eaton
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 189 | Number 1 | January 2018 | Pages 1-25
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2017.1367569
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The time and phase-space dependent backward master equation is used to develop and numerically solve a coupled system of transport equations for the probability distribution of the neutron number in subregions of a spherically symmetric, reflected, subcritical plutonium sphere. The number distributions are computed for a single initial neutron injected into the assembly and localized in phase space as well as in the presence of a uniformly distributed spontaneous fission source in the fissile region. A standard multigroup, discrete ordinates scheme with second-order spatial and fully implicit time discretization proved sufficiently accurate for this application. The results presented show complex behaviors arising from the material interface and spectral effects due to neutron slowing down that cannot be encapsulated in a lumped model. Additionally, low-order spatial moments were computed both by averaging the number distributions of finite order and directly solving the transport equations for the moments using the same numerical scheme. While generally excellent agreement is observed between the two approaches, the truncation order has a noticeable effect on the accuracy of the higher moments that are computed using the number distributions.