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
Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
Meeting Spotlight
2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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
July 2025
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Smarter waste strategies: Helping deliver on the promise of advanced nuclear
At COP28, held in Dubai in 2023, a clear consensus emerged: Nuclear energy must be a cornerstone of the global clean energy transition. With electricity demand projected to soar as we decarbonize not just power but also industry, transport, and heat, the case for new nuclear is compelling. More than 20 countries committed to tripling global nuclear capacity by 2050. In the United States alone, the Department of Energy forecasts that the country’s current nuclear capacity could more than triple, adding 200 GW of new nuclear to the existing 95 GW by mid-century.
Friday, May 20, 2022|8:00AM–5:30PM EDT
Ellwood
Although mainly distributed as a CFD toolbox, OpenFOAM is structured as a general open-source library for the discretization and parallel solution of partial differential equations on unstructured meshes. This combines with a high-level object-oriented API and with an intuitive finite-volume discretization method to allow for a streamlined development of advanced multi-physics solvers for various applications and by authors with various backgrounds. This is resulting in a rapidly growing community of users and developers, with a number of official and community-driven solvers that can nowadays help complement legacy nuclear codes with a wide geometric flexibility, HPC scalability, quick code tailoring, streamlined coupling possibilities, and a full transparency for improved E&T approaches.
The workshop will first present an overview of the multi-physics capabilities of OpenFOAM; listing its main features as a numerical library; highlighting some important achievements and milestones from various authors; singling out currently available solvers for nuclear applications; and discussing the lessons learned from a decade of development efforts. The objective will be to provide the audience with up-to-date information about the modelling possibilities provided by OpenFOAM and to summarize its strengths and challenges, thus allowing for more informed decisions about the opportunity to employ OpenFOAM, or existing OpenFOAM-based tools, for one's own applications.
The workshop will then provide a practical introduction to two open-source tools based on OpenFOAM, namely: the GeN-Foam code for the multiphysics analysis of nuclear reactors; and the OFFBEAT code for the 1.5-D, 2-D and 3-D simulation of fuel behaviour. Topics covered will include learning best practices, available resources, setting up a model, running, post-processing, basics of code tailoring. The objective will be to provide all necessary information for autonomous learning and use of these tools.
The workshop will be conducted as a mix of presentations, open discussions and practical examples. Participants are encouraged to test the practical examples on their own laptops. To that purpose, participants will need to have OpenFOAM 9 already installed (including paraFoam or paraview). Installation instructions are available at https://openfoam.org/download/
