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RIC panel discusses pathway to fusion commercialization
Fusion leaders at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s annual Regulatory Information Conference discussed the path forward for regulating the burgeoning fusion industry. The speakers discussed government and private industry initiatives in the United States and United Kingdom, with a focus on efforts shaping the near-term deployment of commercial fusion machines.
A recurring theme was the need to explain the difference between fission and fusion. Representatives from the Department of Energy and Type One Energy highlighted this as an important distinction for regulators, as it will allow fusion to undergo its own independent maturation process for developing standards and regulations in the same way that fission has. Lea Perlas, Fusion Program director at the Virginia Department of Health, said that confusion between fission and fusion has been a common cause for misplaced concerns among community members surrounding Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ proposed fusion plant site near Richmond, Va.
Connor Woodsford, James Tutt, Jim E. Morel
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 198 | Number 11 | November 2024 | Pages 2148-2156
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2024.2303107
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The second-moment (SM) method is a linear variant of the quasi-diffusion (QD) method for accelerating the iterative convergence of Sn source calculations. It has several significant advantages relative to the QD method, diffusion synthetic acceleration, and nonlinear diffusion acceleration. Here, we define a variant of this method for k-eigenvalue calculations that retains the advantages of the original method, and we computationally demonstrate the efficacy of the method for simple example calculations. In particular, this method has two important properties. First, it is a linear acceleration scheme requiring only the solution of a pure k-eigenvalue diffusion equation with a corrective source term as opposed to a k-eigenvalue drift-diffusion equation. Second, unconditional stability is achieved even when the diffusion equation is not discretized in a manner consistent with the Sn spatial discretization. We are unaware of any other scheme that has these properties. We also show a connection between our method and the k-eigenvalue acceleration technique of Barbu and Adams, which motivated us to develop our SM method.