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.
Division Spotlight
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
Meeting Spotlight
2021 Student Conference
April 8–10, 2021
Virtual Meeting
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
Mar 2021
Jul 2020
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
March 2021
Nuclear Technology
February 2021
Fusion Science and Technology
January 2021
Latest News
NC State celebrates 70 years of nuclear engineering education
An early picture of the research reactor building on the North Carolina State University campus. The Department of Nuclear Engineering is celebrating the 70th anniversary of its nuclear engineering curriculum in 2020–2021. Photo: North Carolina State University
The Department of Nuclear Engineering at North Carolina State University has spent the 2020–2021 academic year celebrating the 70th anniversary of its becoming the first U.S. university to establish a nuclear engineering curriculum. It started in 1950, when Clifford Beck, then of Oak Ridge, Tenn., obtained support from NC State’s dean of engineering, Harold Lampe, to build the nation’s first university nuclear reactor and, in conjunction, establish an educational curriculum dedicated to nuclear engineering.
The department, host to the 2021 ANS Virtual Student Conference, scheduled for April 8–10, now features 23 tenure/tenure-track faculty and three research faculty members. “What a journey for the first nuclear engineering curriculum in the nation,” said Kostadin Ivanov, professor and department head.
Zeyun Wu, Qiong Zhang, Hany Abdel-Khalik
Nuclear Technology | Volume 180 | Number 3 | December 2012 | Pages 372-382
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the Initial Release of MCNP6 / Fission Reactors | dx.doi.org/10.13182/NT12-A15350
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new variant of a hybrid Monte Carlo-deterministic approach for simulating particle transport problems is presented and compared to the SCALE FW-CADIS approach. The new approach, denoted as the SUBSPACE approach, improves the selection of the importance maps in order to reduce the computational overhead required to achieve global variance reduction - that is, the uniform reduction of variance everywhere in the phase-space. The intended applications are reactor analysis problems where detailed responses for all fuel assemblies are required everywhere in the reactor core. Like FW-CADIS, the SUBSPACE approach utilizes importance maps obtained from deterministic adjoint models to derive automatic weight-window biasing. Unlike FW-CADIS, the SUBSPACE approach does not employ flux-based weighting of the adjoint source term. Instead, it utilizes pseudoresponses generated with random weights to help identify the correlations between the importance maps that could be used to reduce the computational time required for global variance reduction. Numerical experiments, serving as proof of principle, are presented to compare the SUBSPACE and FW-CADIS approaches in terms of the global reduction in standard deviation and the associated figures of merit for representative nuclear reactor assembly and core models.