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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
Amelia Trainer, Benoit Forget
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 8 | August 2023 | Pages 1873-1886
Technical papers from: PHYSOR 2022 | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2162302
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Accurate representation of thermal neutron scattering in Monte Carlo transport simulations requires that the molecular vibrations of the target material be accounted for. Historically, this has been achieved by precomputing large multidimensional tables that are a function of temperature and the cosine of the scattering angle, as well as incoming and outgoing neutron energy. Most commonly used sampling techniques for thermal neutron scattering rely on large multidimensional tables, where higher resolution results in an increase in required memory and attempts to reduce memory can result in grid coarseness errors. An alternative sampling method is introduced here that is a significant departure from precomputed tables and instead relies on a more physical model of the scattering behavior. The phonon sampling method classifies neutron scattering events by the number of phonons excited/de-excited during the scattering collision. In doing so, energy exchange may be obtained via rejection sampling, and an analytical representation of the momentum exchange is obtained. This sampling method has been tested on graphite, yttrium hydride, and uranium nitride, and preliminary implementation of the phonon sampling method shows accurate results for angular and energy distributions, though resulting in up to a 40% slowdown in overall calculation time. This notable slowdown is countered, however, by a large reduction in storage (over 99% reduction compared to standard multidimensional tables).