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Division Spotlight
Young Members Group
The Young Members Group works to encourage and enable all young professional members to be actively involved in the efforts and endeavors of the Society at all levels (Professional Divisions, ANS Governance, Local Sections, etc.) as they transition from the role of a student to the role of a professional. It sponsors non-technical workshops and meetings that provide professional development and networking opportunities for young professionals, collaborates with other Divisions and Groups in developing technical and non-technical content for topical and national meetings, encourages its members to participate in the activities of the Groups and Divisions that are closely related to their professional interests as well as in their local sections, introduces young members to the rules and governance structure of the Society, and nominates young professionals for awards and leadership opportunities available to members.
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
Proving DRACO will deliver
The United States is now closer than it has been in over five decades to launching the first nuclear thermal rocket into space, thanks to DRACO—the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Orbit.
Suetsugu Jagawa, Takashi Yoshii, Akihiro Fukao
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 138 | Number 1 | May 2001 | Pages 67-77
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE00-44
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An automated system for designing a loading pattern (LP) for boiling water reactors (BWRs) given a reference LP and control rod (CR) sequence has been developed. This system employs the advanced nodal code SIMULATE-3 and a BWR LP optimization code FINELOAD-3, which uses a simple linear perturbation method and a modified Tabu search method to select potential optimized LP candidates. Both of these unique methods of FINELOAD-3 were developed to achieve an effective BWR LP optimization strategy and to have high computational efficiency. FINELOAD-3 also adjusts deep CR positions to compensate for the core reactivity deviation caused by fuel shuffling. The objective function is to maximize the end-of-cycle core reactivity while satisfying the specified thermal margins and cold shutdown margin constraints. This optimization system realized the practical application for real BWR LP design. Computer time needed to obtain an optimized LP for a typical BWR/5 octant core with 15 depletion steps is ~4 h using an engineering workstation. This system was extensively tested for real BWR reload core designs and showed that the developed LPs using this system are equivalent or better than the manually optimized LPs.