ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
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Division Spotlight
Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
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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Latest News
Kentucky legislature sends nuclear bills to governor
Kentucky’s Republican-majority legislature passed a bill this past week that could bring nuclear energy to the “coal-is-king” state as lawmakers broadly seek solutions to reduce carbon emissions. The bill went to Democratic Gov. Andrew Beshear on Monday for final approval.
Juan Jose Ortiz, Ignacio Requena
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 143 | Number 3 | March 2003 | Pages 254-267
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE03-A2334
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The problem of optimizing refueling in a nuclear boiling water reactor is difficult since it concerns combinatorial optimization and it is NP-Complete. In order to solve this problem, many techniques have been applied, ranging from expert systems to genetic algorithms. In most of these procedures, nuclear reactor simulators are used, which require a longer computation time, to evaluate the goodness of the proposed solutions. As the processes are iterative, many evaluations with the simulator are necessary, and this makes the process extremely slow. In this paper, the use of trained neural networks (NNs) is proposed as an alternative to the simulator, and the results of the NN training are shown in order to predict some variables of interest in the optimization, such as the effective multiplication factor and some thermal limits, related to safety aspects. Finally, a study about the effect of modifying several NN parameters is shown.