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Division Spotlight
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
May 2025
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Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
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.
Young In Kim, Hyung Jin Shim
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 1 | April 2025 | Pages S368-S380
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2024.2332003
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The delayed photoneutron effect should be considered in the point kinetics equation (PKE) applied to D2O and beryllium-moderated or -reflected systems because of its importance on reactor kinetics. This paper proposes neutron-photon-coupled PKE with a clear definition of adjoint-weighted kinetics parameters after providing the mathematical derivation from the neutron and photon transport and precursor equations. The Monte Carlo algorithms to estimate the kinetics parameters are induced from their definition and implemented in the eigenvalue calculation module of McCARD. They are verified through homogeneous infinite-medium problems with few-group neutron and photon cross sections by comparing with analytic solutions.
The proposed PKE and kinetics parameters estimation methods are applied for the kinetics analyses of the artificial control rod drop transient problem in the RB reactor. Photonuclear physics is also implemented in a time-dependent Monte Carlo simulation to calculate the reference data of neutron amplitude in the core to be compared with the PKE results. As good agreement is shown in the neutron amplitude, it is validated that the developed PKE is capable of predicting the reactor kinetics considering photoneutrons.
