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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
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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!
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February 2024
Latest News
Why should safeguards by design be a global effort?
Jeremy Whitlock
I can’t think of a more exciting time to be working in nuclear, with the diversity of advanced reactor development and increasing global support for nuclear in sustainable energy planning. But we can’t lose sight of the need to plan for efficient international safeguards at the same time.
Global nuclear deployment has been underpinned since 1970 by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), making it a key customer requirement for governments to demonstrate unequivocally that the technology is not being misused for weapons development.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has helped verify this commitment for more than 50 years, but it has never safeguarded many of the advanced reactors (and related fuel cycle processes) being developed today.
Elanchezhian Somasundaram, Todd S. Palmer
Nuclear Technology | Volume 193 | Number 3 | March 2016 | Pages 391-403
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NT15-43
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Local Importance Function Transform (LIFT) method is a sophisticated automated variance-reduction technique for Monte Carlo simulation of radiation transport problems. In previous publications, the LIFT method was tested on geometrically simple problems with a coarse representation of radiation energy dependence, and the performance of the method was found to be promising when compared to traditional weight windows–based variance-reduction techniques. In this work, the LIFT method is tested on a spatially complex benchmark test problem with a more realistic representation of energy dependence (50 energy groups) and heterogeneous materials. The performance of the method in comparison with a CADIS (Consistent Adjoint Driven Importance Sampling)–based weight windows method and an analog Monte Carlo simulation is studied. A multigroup Monte Carlo code that utilizes portions of the framework of the deterministic tool Attila has been developed such that the overhead time in implementing the variance-reduction techniques is minimal. The Monte Carlo simulations are performed on an arbitrary tetrahedral mesh created by the mesh generator in Attila. A method to transfer the deterministic solution generated on a finer mesh to a coarser mesh for implementing the hybrid simulations has been developed, and the results are quantified.