ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2026
Jan 2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2026
Nuclear Technology
March 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
May 2026
Latest News
DOE selects first companies for nuclear launch pad
The Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy and the National Reactor Innovation Center have announced their first selections for the Nuclear Energy Launch Pad: three companies developing microreactors and one developing fuel supply.
The four companies—Deployable Energy, General Matter, NuCube Energy, and Radiant Industries—were selected from the initial pool of Reactor Pilot Program and Fuel Line Pilot Program applicants, the two precursor programs to the launch pad.
Parth Singh, Hunter Belanger
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 200 | Number 6 | June 2026 | Pages 1273-1295
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2025.2515347
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Monte Carlo method is typically considered the gold standard for simulating reactor physics problems, as it does not require discretization of the phase space. This is not necessarily true though when simulating multigroup problems, as it has traditionally been a challenge to model anisotropic scattering in such simulations. Multigroup data used in reactor simulations generally use low-order Legendre expansions for scattering distributions, often stopping at the third Legendre moment. With so few terms, the angular distribution can easily have negative regions for highly anisotropic energy transfers, which makes it impossible to use standard Monte Carlo methods to sample a scattering angle. Multigroup Monte Carlo codes therefore often resort to only using isotropic scattering with the transport correction (which is not always possible), or approximating the angular distribution with discrete angles. Neither case is ideal, and makes it difficult to accurately model such problems or verify deterministic codes that can and do make use of the low-order Legendre expansions without issue. This is addressed in the present study by using importance sampling in conjunction with negative particle weights to sample scattering angles from negative scattering distributions. It is demonstrated that such an approach necessitates the use of weight cancellation methods in order to be stable and converge to a solution. The technique is tested on two simple analytic benchmark problems, and then further demonstrated by modeling a small zero-power research reactor, comparing the results against a deterministic solver that can treat anisotropic scattering. Comparison of the simulation results indicates that importance sampling for anisotropic scattering with weight cancellation can be used to obtain reference Monte Carlo results for multigroup problems despite negative scattering distributions.