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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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June 2024
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Latest News
U.S. nuclear capacity factors: Ideal for data centers?
Baseload nuclear generation doesn’t get the respect it deserves, if you ask nuclear operators. But the hyperscale data centers that process our digital lives—like the one right next to the Susquehanna plant in northeastern Pennsylvania—are pushing electricity demand up. Clean, reliable capacity now looks a lot more valuable.
Tran Kim Tuyet, Alexis Jinaphanh, Cédric Jouanne, Frédéric Gérardin, Sébastien Lemaire, Andrea Zoia
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 198 | Number 2 | February 2024 | Pages 319-335
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2195925
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In view of their key role in radiation shielding and nuclear instrumentation applications, photonuclear reactions are receiving growing attention. In this work, we compare the results of the Monte Carlo codes TRIPOLI4®, DIANE, and MCNP® with respect to the Barber and George (B&G) benchmark, with the aim of assessing the accuracy of both nuclear data and particle transport codes for the simulation of photonuclear reactions. We compute the photoneutron yield resulting from the Bremsstrahlung radiation induced by a monoenergetic electron beam (10.5 to 35.5 MeV) impinging on C, Al, Cu, Pb, Ta, and U material targets. The simulation specifications closely follow those of the B&G experiment. For all codes, the reference nuclear data libraries are ENDF/B-VII.1 for neutron transport and photonuclear reactions and EPDL97/EEDL97 for photon/electron transport. Comparisons of the simulation results show an overall agreement between the codes and experimental data and in-between codes, despite some discrepancies.
In order to investigate these effects, we performed a sensitivity analysis by tallying the photon production in addition to neutron production by replacing the electron source with a pure photon source (to single out the impact of electron transport) and by replacing the ENDF/B-VII.1 library with the IAEA/PD-2019. The major contribution to the observed discrepancies is found to be related to the electromagnetic shower models used for coupled electron-photon transport in Monte Carlo codes.