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Division members promote the advancement of mathematical and computational methods for solving problems arising in all disciplines encompassed by the Society. They place particular emphasis on numerical techniques for efficient computer applications to aid in the dissemination, integration, and proper use of computer codes, including preparation of computational benchmark and development of standards for computing practices, and to encourage the development on new computer codes and broaden their use.
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2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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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.
Bobbi Riedel, Christopher M. Perfetti, Forrest B. Brown
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 6 | June 2025 | Pages 941-956
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2024.2403898
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This study conducts a consistent and comprehensive comparison of several methods for estimating upper subcritical limits (USLs) for nuclear criticality safety analysis. To eliminate inconsistency caused by the discrepancy between the estimated covariance data and the true degree of uncertainty present in nuclear data, the experimental system eigenvalues were assumed to equal the calculated eigenvalue for the systems using nominal ENDF/B-VII.1 cross sections, and the estimated calculated eigenvalue was assumed to equal the calculated eigenvalue for the systems using nuclear data from one perturbed cross-section library. USLs are estimated for a variety of validation application cases using the Whisper, TSURFER, and USLSTATS tools and are compared to a reference 95/95 limit. The TSURFER approach produced the strongest agreement with the reference USLs; the Whisper produced USLs that were reliably conservative compared to the reference USL; and the USLSTATS approach experienced difficulty consistently producing accurate USL estimates. Last, this study observed a noteworthy discrepancy when using Cholesky decomposition to randomly sample neutron cross-section covariance data that are small in magnitude.
