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
Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
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
Mar 2024
Jan 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
April 2024
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
February 2024
Latest News
Can hydrogen be the transportation fuel in an otherwise nuclear economy?
Let’s face it: The global economy should be powered primarily by nuclear power. And it probably will by the end of this century, with a still-significant assist from renewables and hydro. Once nuclear systems are dominant, the costs come down to where gas is now; and when carbon emissions are reduced to a small portion of their present state, it will become obvious that most other sources are only good in niche settings. I mean, why use small modular reactors to load-follow when they can just produce that power instead of buffering it?
Min Chull Kim, Inn Seock Kim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 166 | Number 3 | June 2009 | Pages 283-294
Technical Paper | 2007 Space Nuclear Conference / Radiation Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT08-39
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) provides a decision-analysis framework to model unstructured problems in almost every kind of discipline, whether social science, aerospace engineering, or nuclear reactor safety analysis. As common-cause failure (CCF) has been a major element of incidents and accidents in terrestrial nuclear power reactors because of high redundancy built into the systems and susceptibility of these redundant systems to CCF mechanisms, ad hoc approaches used to be taken to address vulnerabilities to CCF by designers or operating staff of the plants. We show in this paper how the AHP in conjunction with goal-tree success-tree (GTST) methodology can be used to identify an optimal CCF-defense strategy under various constraints (e.g., the largest safety impact, the smallest cost, and the least operator burden). This work demonstrates applicability and effectiveness of the AHP decision-analysis technique in CCF-defense assessment with a novel introduction of the GTST methodology as a tool to construct a hierarchical decision tree for the AHP. The combined approach based on AHP and GTST methodologies can be used not only for CCF-defense assessment but also for any other multicriteria decision analysis requiring priority setting.