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
October 2025
Nuclear Technology
September 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
NNSA awards BWXT $1.5B defense fuels contract
The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration has awarded BWX Technologies a contract valued at $1.5 billion to build a Domestic Uranium Enrichment Centrifuge Experiment (DUECE) pilot plant in Tennessee in support of the administration’s efforts to build out a domestic supply of unobligated enriched uranium for defense-related nuclear fuel.
Lorenzo P. Pagani, George E. Apostolakis
Nuclear Technology | Volume 153 | Number 1 | January 2006 | Pages 9-17
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT06-A3685
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The work presented in this paper is part of the broader issue of quantification of safety margins within a load-capacity framework in which uncertainties in loads and capacities are identified and quantified. The present paper describes an example of quantification of uncertainty in the capacity, i.e., the fuel failure enthalpy given a burnup level. The phenomena arising at high burnup are characterized by large uncertainties, as indicated by the scatter in the experimental data. We propose a framework for the probabilistic analysis of the failure limit, i.e., the enthalpy at failure, as a function of burnup. As an example, we obtain the distribution of the failure enthalpy for a Ziracloy-4 rod subjected to a reactivity-initiated accident in a pressurized water reactor by propagating the relevant uncertainties. We use the FRAPCON and FRAPTRAN computer codes, as well as a model for the probability of spallation, to simulate the transient and to obtain data points to derive the conditional probability distribution of the failure enthalpy at a given burnup level. The final results show that the distribution of the failure enthalpy shifts to lower values as burnup increases and that spallation is an important phenomenon.