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Division Spotlight
Nuclear Installations Safety
Devoted specifically to the safety of nuclear installations and the health and safety of the public, this division seeks a better understanding of the role of safety in the design, construction and operation of nuclear installation facilities. The division also promotes engineering and scientific technology advancement associated with the safety of such facilities.
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
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.
M. Scott Greenwood, Ben Betzler
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 193 | Number 4 | April 2019 | Pages 417-430
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2018.1531619
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Fluid-fueled nuclear reactors, such as molten salt reactors (MSRs), have recently gained significant interest. These advanced reactors represent a potential revolutionary shift in the implementation of nuclear power, and as a broad class of reactors, they have the potential to directly address many U.S. energy policy objectives. Fuel that is dissolved in the coolant requires methods to account for the birth, decay, and transport of fission products not only in the core but also throughout the loop and any auxiliary systems, such as off-gas, to which liquid fuel flows, gaseous products are carried, or solid particulates plate out. System models are particularly well suited to explore the wide range of phenomena that are associated with fluid-fueled systems, especially for safeguards analysis. However, before system dynamics can be explored, the compositions of fission products of the salt throughout the loop must be determined as they drive the dynamic behavior of a reactor.
This paper describes the derivation of a modified point-kinetics model for obtaining a first-order approximation of the behavior of a salt-fueled system in which neutron precursors and fission products are born in the fuel-salt and transported outside the core. This paper also provides verification of the model using a steady-state analytic solution and provides additional cases exploring the response under transient cases. This model establishes a baseline model that can be used to explore the dynamic response of fluid-fueled reactors and to investigate important safeguards issues such as mass accountability of source terms. The model is implemented in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory–developed, Modelica-based TRANSFORM library that was developed to investigate various aspects of advanced energy systems.