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.
Division Spotlight
Fusion Energy
This division promotes the development and timely introduction of fusion energy as a sustainable energy source with favorable economic, environmental, and safety attributes. The division cooperates with other organizations on common issues of multidisciplinary fusion science and technology, conducts professional meetings, and disseminates technical information in support of these goals. Members focus on the assessment and resolution of critical developmental issues for practical fusion energy applications.
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2024
Jan 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
May 2024
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Glass strategy: Hanford’s enhanced waste glass program
The mission of the Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection (ORP) is to complete the safe cleanup of waste resulting from decades of nuclear weapons development. One of the most technologically challenging responsibilities is the safe disposition of approximately 56 million gallons of radioactive waste historically stored in 177 tanks at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
ORP has a clear incentive to reduce the overall mission duration and cost. One pathway is to develop and deploy innovative technical solutions that can advance baseline flow sheets toward higher efficiency operations while reducing identified risks without compromising safety. Vitrification is the baseline process that will convert both high-level and low-level radioactive waste at Hanford into a stable glass waste form for long-term storage and disposal.
Although vitrification is a mature technology, there are key areas where technology can further reduce operational risks, advance baseline processes to maximize waste throughput, and provide the underpinning to enhance operational flexibility; all steps in reducing mission duration and cost.
Timothy Flaspoehler, Bojan Petrovic
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 192 | Number 3 | December 2018 | Pages 254-274
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2018.1507185
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In neutral-particle transport shielding problems, variance-reduction methods are used in Monte Carlo (MC) simulations to bias the progression of tracked particles toward user-defined detectors or regions of interest. These biasing techniques allow for converged results in areas that would otherwise be poorly sampled due to low neutron or gamma fluxes relative to the fixed source. One widely used state-of-the-art methodology in shielding simulations is the Consistent Adjoint-Driven Importance Sampling (CADIS) method, which is a hybrid transport methodology that uses deterministic adjoint solutions to define weight window (WW) targets for particle splitting, rouletting, and source biasing during MC. However, for large problems, the WW data can require prohibitively large amounts of memory (tens to hundreds of gigabytes). This can make the simulation not feasible with the available computational resources, or it can restrict execution to a small fraction of nodes with large enough memory, thus significantly reducing the available resources and increasing the turnaround time needed to complete intended analyses.
A novel methodology and data structure have been developed and implemented within the MONACO and MAVRIC sequences of the Scale 6.1 code package that greatly reduces memory requirements for storing WW maps by orders of magnitude. The data structure is accompanied with an algorithm that determines mesh reduction through coarsening and refinement using contributon response theory. Large memory savings are achieved by using separate block-structured grids for each energy group. The implementation of this methodology leads to a fractional increase in biased MC simulation time due to tracking particles through a more complex data structure storing the WW targets. For large shielding problems, enhanced parallelism enabled by memory reduction more than compensates for the decline in biased MC performance resulting in an effective speedup in solution time. Here, the improvements and drawbacks in the methodology are demonstrated on the relatively small but well-known Pool Critical Assembly shielding benchmark. The methodology showed a reduction in memory of from 163 to 194 times, with only a limited slowdown in biasing efficiency between 1% and 9%.