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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
Meeting Spotlight
2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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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Latest News
Former NRC commissioners lend support to efforts to eliminate mandatory hearings
A group of nine former nuclear regulatory commissioners sent a letter Wednesday to the current Nuclear Regulatory Commission members lending support to efforts to get rid of mandatory hearings in the licensing process, which should speed up the process by three to six months and save millions of dollars.
John C. Wagner, Douglas E. Peplow, Thomas M. Evans
Nuclear Technology | Volume 168 | Number 3 | December 2009 | Pages 799-809
MC Calculations | Special Issue on the 11th International Conference on Radiation Shielding and the 15th Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division (PART 3) / Radiation Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A9309
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Simulating nuclear well-logging devices with Monte Carlo methods is computationally challenging and requires significant variance reduction to compute detector responses with low statistical uncertainties in reasonable lengths of time. The consistent adjoint-driven importance sampling (CADIS) method, which provides consistent source and transport biasing parameters based on a deterministic adjoint (importance) function, has been demonstrated to be very effective for well-logging simulations and other deep-penetration problems. A recent extension to the CADIS method, FW-CADIS (forward-weighted CADIS), is designed to optimize the calculation of several tallies at once by using an adjoint function based on an adjoint source weighted by the inverse of the forward flux. These advanced variance reduction methods have been incorporated and automated into the MAVRIC sequence of SCALE, making them very easy to use. The CADIS and FW-CADIS methods are demonstrated and compared on simple benchmark models of both neutron- and photon-based well-logging devices. Both advanced variance reduction methods offer a substantial reduction in computing time, compared to analog simulation, for these applications.