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
Decommissioning & Environmental Sciences
The mission of the Decommissioning and Environmental Sciences (DES) Division is to promote the development and use of those skills and technologies associated with the use of nuclear energy and the optimal management and stewardship of the environment, sustainable development, decommissioning, remediation, reutilization, and long-term surveillance and maintenance of nuclear-related installations, and sites. The target audience for this effort is the membership of the Division, the Society, and the public at large.
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
Apr 2024
Jan 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2024
Nuclear Technology
May 2024
Fusion Science and Technology
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.
Anthony M. Scopatz, Erich A. Schneider, Jun Li, Man-Sung Yim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 183 | Number 1 | July 2013 | Pages 45-61
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A16991
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Technology development and deployment decisions are justified by weighing their costs against the expected benefits. Multiple nuclear fuel cycle (NFC) simulation models have been devised, some with the aim of quantifying cyclewide sensitivities to variations from base-case scenarios. Base-case sensitivity studies often perturb only one parameter at a time and only in the region around the initial value. This paper details a sensitivity study methodology that applies entropy-based statistical methods of information theory to describe outcomes produced by an NFC model. This supersedes past efforts at sensitivity and uncertainty analysis by allowing a much larger space to be explored. Here, 30 independent fuel cycle parameters for a fast reactor-light water reactor hybrid scenario are varied simultaneously and stochastically. This fuel cycle schema was chosen as a well-known, sufficiently complex model; the underlying statistical methods could be applied to any cycle. This study uses the uncertainty coefficient computed from contingency tables (CTs) to represent the sensitivity of a technology-defining input to the response. The response of interest here was taken to be the deep geologic repository capacity for a given realization of fuel cycle inputs. After computing the uncertainty coefficients, the inputs themselves are sorted based on decreasing sensitivities. Fast reactor used fuel plutonium separations were found to be most important to the cycle. Furthermore, to represent input covariances (the effect of one input on the sensitivity of a second input to the response), a new measure is defined on three-dimensional CTs. This metric is the coefficient of the variation of uncertainty coefficient of two-dimensional slices of the original table. Sorting by this sensitivity of sensitivity metric, the input pair of fast reactor americium separations together with high-level-waste storage time was found to have the largest joint effect on the repository capacity.