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Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy
The mission of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy Division (NNPD) is to promote the peaceful use of nuclear technology while simultaneously preventing the diversion and misuse of nuclear material and technology through appropriate safeguards and security, and promotion of nuclear nonproliferation policies. To achieve this mission, the objectives of the NNPD are to: Promote policy that discourages the proliferation of nuclear technology and material to inappropriate entities. Provide information to ANS members, the technical community at large, opinion leaders, and decision makers to improve their understanding of nuclear nonproliferation issues. Become a recognized technical resource on nuclear nonproliferation, safeguards, and security issues. Serve as the integration and coordination body for nuclear nonproliferation activities for the ANS. Work cooperatively with other ANS divisions to achieve these objective nonproliferation policies.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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!
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Can hydrogen be the transportation fuel in an otherwise nuclear economy?
Let’s face it: The global economy should be powered primarily by nuclear power. And it probably will by the end of this century, with a still-significant assist from renewables and hydro. Once nuclear systems are dominant, the costs come down to where gas is now; and when carbon emissions are reduced to a small portion of their present state, it will become obvious that most other sources are only good in niche settings. I mean, why use small modular reactors to load-follow when they can just produce that power instead of buffering it?
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.