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
Nuclear Criticality Safety
NCSD provides communication among nuclear criticality safety professionals through the development of standards, the evolution of training methods and materials, the presentation of technical data and procedures, and the creation of specialty publications. In these ways, the division furthers the exchange of technical information on nuclear criticality safety with the ultimate goal of promoting the safe handling of fissionable materials outside reactors.
Meeting Spotlight
Conference on Nuclear Training and Education: A Biennial International Forum (CONTE 2025)
February 3–6, 2025
Amelia Island, FL|Omni Amelia Island Resort
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
Jan 2025
Jul 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
February 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Resurrecting Three Mile Island
When Exelon Generation shut down Three Mile Island Unit 1 in September 2019, managers were so certain that the reactor would never run again that as soon as they could, they had workers drain the oil out of both the main transformer and a spare to eliminate the chance of leaks. The company was unable to find a buyer because of the transformers’ unusual design. “We couldn’t give them away,” said Trevor Orth, the plant manager. So they scrapped them.
Now they will pay $100 million for a replacement.
The turnaround at the reactor—now called the Crane Clean Energy Center—highlights two points: how smart Congress was to step in with help to prevent premature closures with the zero-emission nuclear power production credit of 0.3 cents per kilowatt-hour (only two years too late), and how expensive it is turning out to be to change course.
Hans R. Hammer, Jim E. Morel, Yaqi Wang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 193 | Number 5 | May 2019 | Pages 453-480
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2018.1542865
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this paper we show the extension of nonlinear diffusion acceleration (NDA) to geometries containing small voids using a weighted-least-squares (WLS) high-order equation. Even though the WLS equation is well defined in voids, the low-order drift-diffusion equation was not defined in materials with a zero cross section. This paper derives the necessary modifications to the NDA algorithm. We show that a small change to the NDA closure term and a nonlocal definition of the diffusion coefficient solve the problems for void regions. These changes do not affect the algorithm for optically thick material regions while making the algorithm well defined in optically thin ones. We use a Fourier analysis to perform an iterative analysis to confirm that the modifications result in a stable and efficient algorithm. Later in the paper, numerical results of our method are presented. We test this formulation with a small, one-dimensional test problem. Additionally, we present results for a modified version of the C5G7 benchmark containing voids as a more complex, reactor-like problem. We compared our results to Texas A&M’s transport code PDT, utilizing a first-order discontinuous formulation as reference and the self-adjoint angular flux equation with void treatment (SAAF), a different second-order form. The results indicate that the NDA WLS performed comparably or slightly worse then the asymmetric SAAF while maintaining a symmetric discretization matrix.