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 Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
Mar 2026
Jan 2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
April 2026
Nuclear Technology
February 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Going Nuclear: Notes from the officially unofficial book tour
I work in the analytical labs at one of Europe’s oldest and largest nuclear sites: Sellafield, in northwestern England. I spend my days at the fume hood front, pipette in one hand and radiation probe in the other (and dosimeter pinned to my chest, of course). Outside the lab, I have a second job: I moonlight as a writer and public speaker. My new popular science book—Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World—came out last summer, and it feels like my life has been running at full power ever since.
Anurag Gupta, R. S. Modak
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 194 | Number 2 | February 2020 | Pages 87-103
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2019.1668655
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Monte Carlo calculations for the evaluation of fundamental mode solution of k-eigenvalue problems generally make use of the Power Iteration (PI) method, which suffers from poor convergence, particularly in the case of large, loosely coupled systems. In the present paper, a method called Meyer’s Subspace Iteration (SSI) method, also called the Simultaneous vector iteration algorithm, is applied for the Monte Carlo solution of the k-eigenvalue problem. The SSI method is the block generalization of the single-vector PI method and has been found to work efficiently for solving the problem with the deterministic neutron transport setup. It is found that the convergence of the fundamental k-eigenvalue and corresponding fission source distribution improves substantially with the SSI-based Monte Carlo method as compared to the PI-based Monte Carlo method. To reduce the extra computational effort needed for simultaneous iterations with several vectors, a novel procedure is adopted in which it takes almost the same effort as with the single-vector PI-based Monte Carlo method. The algorithm is applied to several one-dimensional slab test cases of varying difficulty, and the results are compared with the standard PI method. It is observed that unlike the PI method, the SSI-based Monte Carlo method converges quickly and does not require many inactive generations before the mean and variance of eigenvalues could be estimated. It has been demonstrated that the SSI method can simultaneously find a set of the most dominant higher k-eigenmodes in addition to the fundamental mode solution.