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.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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
Sep 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
October 2025
Latest News
NN Asks: What did you learn from ANS’s Nuclear 101?
Mike Harkin
When ANS first announced its new Nuclear 101 certificate course, I was excited. This felt like a course tailor-made for me, a transplant into the commercial nuclear world. I enrolled for the inaugural session held in November 2024, knowing it was going to be hard (this is nuclear power, of course)—but I had been working on ramping up my knowledge base for the past year, through both my employer and at a local college.
The course was a fast-and-furious roller-coaster ride through all the key components of the nuclear power industry, in one highly challenging week. In fact, the challenges the students experienced caught even the instructors by surprise. Thankfully, the shared intellectual stretch we students all felt helped us band together to push through to the end.
We were all impressed with the quality of the instructors, who are some of the top experts in the field. We appreciated not only their knowledge base but their support whenever someone struggled to understand a concept.
D. F. Da Cruz, D. Rochman, A. J. Koning
Nuclear Technology | Volume 185 | Number 2 | February 2014 | Pages 174-191
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle And Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT12-154
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Uncertainty analysis on reactivity and discharged inventory for a typical pressurized water reactor fuel element as a result of uncertainties in 235,238U, 239,240,241Pu, and fission products nuclear data was performed. A typical Westinghouse three-loop fuel assembly fueled with UO2 fuel with 4.8% enrichment was selected. The Total Monte Carlo method was applied using the deterministic transport code DRAGON. This code allows the generation of the few-groups nuclear data libraries by directly using data contained in the nuclear data evaluation files. The nuclear data used in this study are from the JEFF3.1 evaluation, with the exception of the nuclear data files for U, Pu, and fission products isotopes (randomized for the generation of the various DRAGON libraries). These are taken from the TALYS evaluated nuclear data library TENDL-2012. Results show that the calculated total uncertainty in keff (as a result of uncertainties in nuclear data of the considered isotopes) is virtually independent of fuel burnup, and amounts to 700 pcm. The uncertainties in the inventory of the discharged fuel are dependent on the element considered and lie in the range 1% to 15% for most fission products, and are <5% for the most important actinides. The total uncertainty on the reactor parameters was also split into different components (different nuclear reaction channels), and the main sources of uncertainties were identified.
