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 Winter Conference & Expo
November 15–18, 2026
Phoenix, AZ|Arizona Grand Resort & Spa
Latest Magazine Issues
Aug 2026
Jan 2026
2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
October 2026
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
August 2026
Latest News
Fuel loading process begins at Palisades
The Palisades nuclear power plant has drawn closer to restart, as plant staff began the process of loading fuel into the reactor vessel on Sunday morning.
The commencement of fuel loading places the Covert, Mich., facility in Mode 6—or the refueling stage—under the plant’s technical specifications, plant owner and operator Holtec International said in a news release. The Palisades reactor core consists of 204 fuel assemblies that include new fuel and partially used fuel from the plant’s most recent operating cycles. According to Holtec, the fuel loading is being conducted in accordance with plant procedures and technical specifications.
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.