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 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 15–18, 2026
Phoenix, AZ|Arizona Grand Resort & Spa
Latest Magazine Issues
Aug 2026
Jan 2026
2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
October 2026
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
August 2026
Latest News
Fuel loading process begins at Palisades
The Palisades nuclear power plant has drawn closer to restart, as plant staff began the process of loading fuel into the reactor vessel on Sunday morning.
The commencement of fuel loading places the Covert, Mich., facility in Mode 6—or the refueling stage—under the plant’s technical specifications, plant owner and operator Holtec International said in a news release. The Palisades reactor core consists of 204 fuel assemblies that include new fuel and partially used fuel from the plant’s most recent operating cycles. According to Holtec, the fuel loading is being conducted in accordance with plant procedures and technical specifications.
Dean Wang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 193 | Number 12 | December 2019 | Pages 1339-1354
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2019.1638660
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The SN transport equation asymptotically tends to an equivalent diffusion equation in the limit of optically thick systems with small absorption and sources. A spatial discretization of the SN equation is of practical interest if it possesses the optically thick diffusion limit. Such a numerical scheme will yield accurate solutions for diffusive problems if the spatial mesh size is thin with respect to a diffusion length, whereas the mesh cells are thick in terms of a mean free path. Many spatial discretization methods have been developed for the SN transport equation, but only a few of them can obtain the thick diffusion limit under certain conditions. This paper presents a theoretical result that simply states that the mesh size required for a finite difference scheme to attain the diffusion limit is , where is the order of accuracy of spatial discretization, is the “diffusion” mesh size that can be many mean free paths thick, and is a small positive scaling parameter that can be defined as the ratio of a particle mean free path to a characteristic scale length of the system. Numerical results for schemes such as the Diamond Difference method, Step Characteristic method, Step Difference method, Second-Order Upwind method, and Lax-Friedrichs Weighted Essentially Non-Oscillatory method of the third order (LF-WENO3) are presented that demonstrate the validity and accuracy of our analysis.