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 Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
Latest Magazine Issues
Jul 2026
Jan 2026
2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2026
Nuclear Technology
August 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Texas A&M welcomes uranium conversion research
The Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) has signed a research agreement with Quantum Leap Energy (QLE) “to advance and de-risk the commercial production of high-purity uranium hexafluoride (UF6).”
QLE is an Austin, Texas–based subsidiary of ASP Isotopes (ASPI), which is developing an isotope enrichment platform for applications in nuclear energy, nuclear medicine, and semiconductors. QLE specializes in the uranium conversion step of the nuclear fuel cycle—the conversion of yellowcake uranium concentrate (U3O8) into UF6 prior to enrichment.
Michael Jarrett, Brendan Kochunas, Edward Larsen, Thomas Downar
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 193 | Number 12 | December 2019 | Pages 1291-1309
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2019.1627176
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new method for calculating anisotropic radial transverse leakage (TL) in a two-dimensional (2D)/one-dimensional (1D) transport method is derived and implemented in MPACT. This method makes use of parity in the polar angle only to form the 2D transport equations for the 2D/1D method. The even-parity component is solved on a fine mesh using the method of characteristics (MOC), while the odd-parity component is solved on a coarse mesh using S. The anisotropic radial TL on the coarse cell boundaries is calculated by combining the even- and odd-parity components. The new method is faster than a similar previous method because it delegates half of the work required to calculate the solution of the 2D transport problem to a coarse-mesh S solver, which is more than ten times faster than the fine-mesh MOC solver. The results show that the accuracy of the new method is equivalent to that of the previously implemented method for anisotropic TL, with a significant speedup. With azimuthally isotropic TL, the new method reduces the computational overhead compared to the standard method from 58% to 5% for the three-dimensional (3D) C5G7 benchmark problems. With azimuthally anisotrop\ic TL using Fourier expansion, the new method reduces the overhead from 84% to 37%. This is important because the accuracy of the 2D/1D method is limited by the isotropic TL approximation. With anisotropic TL, the accuracy of 2D/1D is equivalent or comparable to 3D transport, but there is a significant computational cost associated with calculating the anisotropic TL. The method presented provides a faster way to calculate the anisotropic TL, giving the 2D/1D method significantly increased accuracy with only a modest increase in computational requirements compared to isotropic 2D/1D.