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
Materials Science & Technology
The objectives of MSTD are: promote the advancement of materials science in Nuclear Science Technology; support the multidisciplines which constitute it; encourage research by providing a forum for the presentation, exchange, and documentation of relevant information; promote the interaction and communication among its members; and recognize and reward its members for significant contributions to the field of materials science in nuclear technology.
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2024
Jan 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2024
Nuclear Technology
May 2024
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Commercial nuclear innovation "new space" age
In early 2006, a start-up company launched a small rocket from a tiny island in the Pacific. It exploded, showering the island with debris. A year later, a second launch attempt sent a rocket to space but failed to make orbit, burning up in the atmosphere. Another year brought a third attempt—and a third failure. The following month, in September 2008, the company used the last of its funds to launch a fourth rocket. It reached orbit, making history as the first privately funded liquid-fueled rocket to do so.
Dan G. Cacuci, Federico Di Rocco
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 185 | Number 3 | March 2017 | Pages 484-548
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2017.1279940
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A cooling tower discharges waste heat produced by an industrial plant to the external environment. The amount of thermal energy discharged into the environment can be determined by measurements of quantities representing the external conditions, such as outlet air temperature, outlet water temperature, and outlet air relative humidity, in conjunction with computational models that simulate numerically the cooling tower’s behavior. Variations in the model’s parameters (e.g., material properties, model correlations, boundary conditions) cause variations in the model’s response. The functional derivatives of the model response with respect to the model parameters (called “sensitivities”) are needed to quantify such response variations changes. In this work, the comprehensive adjoint sensitivity analysis methodology for nonlinear systems is applied to compute the cooling tower’s response sensitivities to all of its model parameters. These sensitivities are used in this work for (1) ranking the model parameters according to the magnitude of their contribution to response uncertainties; (2) propagating the uncertainties in the model’s parameters to quantify the uncertainties in the model’s responses. In an accompanying work, these sensitivities are subsequently used for predictive modeling, combining computational and experimental information, including the respective uncertainties, to obtain optimally predicted best-estimate nominal values for the model’s parameters and responses, with reduced predicted uncertainties.