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Division Spotlight
Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
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2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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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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AI and productivity growth
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
This month’s issue of Nuclear News focuses on supply and demand. The “supply” part of the story highlights nuclear’s continued success in providing electricity to the grid more than 90 percent of the time, while the “demand” part explores the seemingly insatiable appetite of hyperscale data centers for steady, carbon-free energy.
Technically, we are in the second year of our AI epiphany, the collective realization that Big Tech’s energy demands are so large that they cannot be met without a historic build-out of new generation capacity. Yet the enormity of it all still seems hard to grasp.
or the better part of two decades, U.S. electricity demand has been flat. Sure, we’ve seen annual fluctuations that correlate with weather patterns and the overall domestic economic performance, but the gigawatt-hours of electricity America consumed in 2021 are almost identical to our 2007 numbers.
Pratibha Yadav, Reuven Rachamin, Jörg Konheiser, Silvio Baier
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 198 | Number 2 | February 2024 | Pages 497-507
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2211199
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In nuclear engineering, Monte Carlo (MC) methods are commonly used for reactor analysis and radiation shielding problems. These methods are capable of dealing with both simple and complex system models with accuracy. The application of MC methods experiences challenges when dealing with the deep penetration problems that are typically encountered in radiation shielding cases. It is difficult to produce statistically reliable results due to poor particle sampling in the region of interest. Therefore, such calculations are performed by the Monte Carlo N-Particle Transport (MCNP) code in association with the weight window (WW) variance reduction technique, which increases the particle statistics in the desired tally region. However, for large problems, MCNP’s built-in weight window generator (WWG) produces zero WW parameters for tally regions located far from the source. To address this issue, the recursive Monte Carlo (RMC) method was proposed. This paper focuses on the RMC methodology and its implementation in the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf’s (HZDR’s) in-house code TRAWEI, which is responsible for producing optimal zone weight parameters used for optimizing deep penetration MC calculations. In addition, this paper discusses the verification of the TRAWEI weight generator program to that of an existing MCNP WWG. The performance of TRAWEI-generated weight values is assessed using a handful of test cases involving two shield materials. Globally, the TRAWEI-generated weight values improved not only the statistical variance and computational efficiency of the MC run compared to the analog MCNP simulation but also those of the simulation with WW values generated by the standard MCNP WWG.