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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!
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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
Kenneth Assogba, Lahbib Bourhrara, Igor Zmijarevic, Grégoire Allaire, Antonio Galia
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 8 | August 2023 | Pages 1584-1599
Technical papers from: PHYSOR 2022 | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2154546
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The spherical harmonics or PN method is intended to approximate the neutron angular flux by a linear combination of spherical harmonics of degree at most . In this work, the PN method is combined with the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) finite elements method and yield to a full discretization of the multigroup neutron transport equation. The employed method is able to handle all geometries describing the fuel elements without any simplification nor homogenization. Moreover, the use of the matrix assembly-free method avoids building large sparse matrices, which enables producing high-order solutions in a small computational time and less storage usage. The resulting transport solver, called NYMO, has a wide range of applications; it can be used for a core calculation as well as for a precise 281-group lattice calculation accounting for anisotropic scattering. To assess the accuracy of this numerical scheme, it is applied to a three-dimensional (3-D) reactor core and fuel assembly calculations. These calculations point out that the proposed PN -DG method is capable of producing precise solutions, while the developed solver is able to handle complex 3-D core and assembly geometries.