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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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The newest era of workforce development at ANS
As most attendees of this year’s ANS Annual Conference left breakfast in the Grand Ballroom of the Chicago Downtown Marriott to sit in on presentations covering everything from career pathways in fusion to recently digitized archival nuclear films, 40 of them made their way to the hotel’s fifth floor to take part in the second offering of Nuclear 101, a newly designed certification course that seeks to give professionals who are in or adjacent to the industry an in-depth understanding of the essentials of nuclear energy and engineering from some of the field’s leading experts.
Jaakko Leppänen
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 11 | November 2019 | Pages 1416-1432
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1603710
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A deterministic importance solver has been implemented as an internal subroutine in the Serpent 2 Monte Carlo code for the purpose of producing weight-window meshes for variance reduction. The routine solves the adjoint transport problem using the response matrix method with coupling coefficients obtained from a conventional forward Monte Carlo simulation. The methodology can be applied to photon and neutron external source problems, and the solver supports multiple energy groups and several mesh types. Importances can be generated with respect to multiple responses, and an iterative global variance reduction sequence enables distributing the transported particle population evenly throughout the geometry. This paper describes the methodology applied in the response matrix solver and presents a verification for the generated importance functions through simple demonstrations. A practical example involving a photon shielding problem is included for performance evaluation.