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
Young Members Group
The Young Members Group works to encourage and enable all young professional members to be actively involved in the efforts and endeavors of the Society at all levels (Professional Divisions, ANS Governance, Local Sections, etc.) as they transition from the role of a student to the role of a professional. It sponsors non-technical workshops and meetings that provide professional development and networking opportunities for young professionals, collaborates with other Divisions and Groups in developing technical and non-technical content for topical and national meetings, encourages its members to participate in the activities of the Groups and Divisions that are closely related to their professional interests as well as in their local sections, introduces young members to the rules and governance structure of the Society, and nominates young professionals for awards and leadership opportunities available to members.
Meeting Spotlight
2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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
May 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
July 2025
Nuclear Technology
June 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
High-temperature plumbing and advanced reactors
The use of nuclear fission power and its role in impacting climate change is hotly debated. Fission advocates argue that short-term solutions would involve the rapid deployment of Gen III+ nuclear reactors, like Vogtle-3 and -4, while long-term climate change impact would rely on the creation and implementation of Gen IV reactors, “inherently safe” reactors that use passive laws of physics and chemistry rather than active controls such as valves and pumps to operate safely. While Gen IV reactors vary in many ways, one thing unites nearly all of them: the use of exotic, high-temperature coolants. These fluids, like molten salts and liquid metals, can enable reactor engineers to design much safer nuclear reactors—ultimately because the boiling point of each fluid is extremely high. Fluids that remain liquid over large temperature ranges can provide good heat transfer through many demanding conditions, all with minimal pressurization. Although the most apparent use for these fluids is advanced fission power, they have the potential to be applied to other power generation sources such as fusion, thermal storage, solar, or high-temperature process heat.1–3
Sam Pasmann, Ilham Variansyah, C. T. Kelley, Ryan McClarren
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 6 | June 2023 | Pages 1159-1173
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2143704
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this work we investigate replacing standard quadrature techniques used in deterministic linear solvers with a fixed-seed Quasi–Monte Carlo (QMC) calculation to obtain more accurate and efficient solutions to the neutron transport equation (NTE). QMC is the use of low-discrepancy sequences to sample the phase-space in place of pseudorandom number generators used by traditional Monte Carlo (MC). QMC techniques decrease the variance in the stochastic transport sweep and therefore increase the accuracy of the iterative method. Historically, QMC has largely been ignored by the particle transport community because it breaks the Markovian assumption needed to model scattering in analog MC particle simulations. However, by using iterative methods the NTE can be modeled as a pure-absorption problem. This removes the need to explicitly model particle scattering and provides an application well suited for QMC. To obtain solutions we experimented with three separate iterative solvers: the standard Source Iteration (SI) Solver and two linear Krylov Solvers, i.e., the Generalized Minimal RESidual method (GMRES) and the BiConjugate Gradient STABilized method (BiCGSTAB). The resulting hybrid iterative-QMC solver was assessed on three slab geometry problems of one dimension. In each sample problem the Krylov Solvers achieve convergence with far fewer iterations (up to eight times) than the SI Solver. Regardless of the linear solver used, the hybrid method achieved an approximate convergence rate of as compared to the expected of traditional MC simulation across all test problems.