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
Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
Meeting Spotlight
Utility Working Conference and Vendor Technology Expo (UWC 2024)
August 4–7, 2024
Marco Island, FL|JW Marriott Marco Island
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
Jul 2024
Jan 2024
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Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2024
Nuclear Technology
August 2024
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Taking shape: Fusion energy ecosystems built with public-private partnerships
It’s possible to describe fusion in simple terms: heat and squeeze small atoms to get abundant clean energy. But there’s nothing simple about getting fusion ready for the grid.
Private developers, national lab and university researchers, suppliers, and end users working toward that goal are developing a range of complex technologies to reach fusion temperatures and pressures, confounded by science and technology gaps linked to plasma behavior; materials, diagnostics, and electronics for extreme environments; fuel cycle sustainability; and economics.
Challenge: Accelerate development and qualification of advanced materials.
How: Use science-based design to reduce the development and qualification timeline for new nuclear fuels and advanced materials that can withstand extreme fission, fusion, and space power and propulsion environments.
Background: Advanced fission and fusion reactor designs offer many potential benefits, but will require new materials to be optimized. These advanced reactors have unique challenges that call for materials to resist corrosion when in prolonged contact with liquid salts or liquid metals, remain strong at elevated temperatures in a neutron field, maintain structural integrity when exposed to high fluxes of light ions and high heat flux, resist reaction in a loss of coolant event, and more.
Materials must be developed and qualified for each of these areas so that they can be implemented in new reactors. Materials issues lie at the heart of many of the technology issues that need to be solved. Without advanced materials, adequately qualified so that they can be used in engineering designs, we will never have a viable fusion or advanced fission power plant. This is a multi-faceted challenge that benefits not only nuclear energy research, but has applications for many other industries.
The current development and qualification timeline is long, especially due to limited experimental facilities and capabilities for in-reactor material irradiation testing. Significant scientific advances over the past few decades have enabled us to improve our understanding of irradiation effects on materials, including predictive capabilities. As such, we believe we can utilize these advancements to accelerate the materials qualification timeline, effectively reducing that barrier against deployment of future reactor technologies. Realizing this goal will include smart use of advanced modeling approaches, the establishment of experimental facilities and data generation for validation analysis (especially for advanced reactors), and reconsideration or modification of existing requirements for in-reactor material irradiation testing.
Additionally, decades of ion beam irradiation have proven it to be an extremely useful tool to enhance the understanding of radiation damage in materials for nuclear applications. Inducing radiation damage utilizing ion beams in structural materials and fuels causes high displacement damage rates and therefore accelerates the research on the materials response under these conditions.
Last modified May 12, 2017, 1:23am CDT