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
Aug 2026
Jan 2026
2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
October 2026
Nuclear Technology
September 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
August 2026
Latest News
A closer look at the initial NLIC selections—Part 2
In January, the Department of Energy announced its new Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus (NLIC) program, inviting states via a request for information to express their interest in hosting a facility supporting work from the front to the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle.
By April, 26 states had expressed interest in hosting such a facility. At the end of July, the DOE signed memorandums of understanding with five states—Idaho, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Utah—to more closely explore the possibilities of state-federal partnerships. These MOUs are not firm commitments from either the federal or state governments. Time will tell which—if any—of the five states develop projects through the program. In the meantime, today, we are taking a close look at what Utah, Idaho, Tennessee can offer in terms of a preexisting nuclear sector that could support new fuel cycle developments.
Andrew T. Till, Marvin L. Adams, Jim E. Morel
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 196 | Number 1 | January 2022 | Pages 53-74
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2021.1932224
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Energy discretization of the transport equation is difficult due to numerous strong, narrow cross-section (XS) resonances. The standard traditional multigroup (MG) method can be sensitive to approximations in the weighting spectrum chosen for XS averaging, which can lead to inaccurate treatment of important phenomena such as self-shielding. We generalize the concept of a group to a discontiguous range of energies to create the Finite-Element with Discontiguous-Support (FEDS) method. FEDS uses clustering algorithms from machine learning to determine optimal definitions of discontiguous groups. By combining parts of multiple resonances into the same group, FEDS can accurately treat resonance behavior even when the number of groups is orders of magnitude smaller than the number of resonances. In this paper, we introduce the theory of the FEDS method and describe the workflow needed to use FEDS, noting that ordinary MG codes can use FEDS XSs without modification, provided these codes can handle upscattering. This allows existing MG codes to produce FEDS solutions. In the context of light water reactors, we investigate properties of FEDS XSs compared to MG XSs and compare -eigenvalue and reaction rate quantities of interest to continuous-energy Monte Carlo, showing that FEDS provides higher accuracy and less cancellation of error than MG with expert-chosen group structures.