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
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
Meeting Spotlight
Conference on Nuclear Training and Education: A Biennial International Forum (CONTE 2021)
February 9–11, 2021
Virtual Meeting
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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
February 2021
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January 2021
Fusion Science and Technology
November 2020
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Notes on fusion
The ST25-HTS tokamak.
Governments around the world have been interested in fusion for more than 70 years. Fusion research was largely secret until 1968, when the Soviets unveiled exciting results from their tokamak (a magnetic confinement fusion device with a particular configuration that produces a toroidal plasma). The Soviets realized that tokamaks were not useful as weapons but could produce plasma in the million-degree temperature range to demonstrate Soviet scientific and technical prowess to the world.
Following this breakthrough, government laboratories around the world continued to pursue various methods of confining hot plasma to understand plasma physics under extreme conditions, getting closer and closer to the conditions necessary for fusion energy production. Tokamaks have been by far the most successful configuration. In the 1990s, the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory produced 10 MW of fusion power using deuterium-tritium fusion. A few years later, the Joint European Torus (JET) in the United Kingdom increased that to 16 MW, getting close to breakeven using 24 MW of power to heat the plasma.
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Nuclear technology may have come a long way in the past 60-70 years, but new ideas have the possibility of moving at a much faster pace in today's advanced scientific environment.
Those who work in nuclear professions recognize the many benefits that nuclear technologies currently bring to our lives, and are driven to continuously make them better and to take them in new and exciting directions.
That is what the Nuclear Grand Challenges project is about.
American Nuclear Society members were involved in the selection process, because they are the specialists best positioned to know the current landscape and potential for the future of nuclear technologies. The project was launched at the ANS 2016 Winter Meeting with a roundtable brainstorming session with more than 125 nuclear professionals. ANS members, as well as the public, were then invited to submit their ideas.
Nearly 300 proposed challenges were analyzed and vetted by the appropriate ANS Professional Division(s). Each division selected one to three Division Grand Challenges. A selection committee including all ANS division chairs and board of directors members identified nine ANS Nuclear Grand Challenges that were announced at the ANS Annual Meeting on June 12, 2017, in San Francisco, Calif.
The results are the ANS Nuclear Grand Challenges below. These will provide an opportunity for ANS members and other interested parties to drive conversations about the issues needed to be addressed to advance the benefits of nuclear science and technology for future generations.
Last modified June 12, 2017, 2:20pm CDT
