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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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NEA report calls for more accurate data on SNF heat decay
The OECD Nuclear Energy Agency has issued a report calling for more-detailed information on tracking the decay heat of spent nuclear fuel from light water reactors. According to the NEA, the report highlights the increasing importance of accurate decay heat estimations due to evolving fuel characteristics, including higher initial fuel enrichment, increased burn-up rates, and extended reactor cycle lengths.
The report, Summary of the NEA Assessment on Spent Nuclear Fuel Decay Heat for Light Water Reactors, summarizes the findings of a subgroup of the NEA’s Working Party on Nuclear Criticality Safety (WPNCS), which ran from January 2022 to January 2024.
Technical Session|Panel|Sponsored by RPD
Tuesday, November 15, 2022|1:00–2:45PM MST|Sonoran 7
Session Chair:
Samuel E. Bays
Session Organizer:
Alternate Chair:
Massimiliano Fratoni
The Reactor Physics Division is hosting a panel discussion of the need for and development of a standard to address the initial fuel loading and startup testing of a demonstration first-of-a-kind reactor. Members of this expert panel will include program leaders from actual past reactors. The panel will include commercial reactor physics software developers with NQA-1 software quality experience. The panel will also include regulatory authority on advanced reactor licensing. Modeling software being used to design advanced reactors (fission batter, micro-, SMRs) today is typically validated using pre-existing peer reviewed integral benchmarks. Although benchmarking activities are very rigorous, the propagated uncertainties for as-built reactor systems can still be quite large. Additionally, the advanced reactor systems being considered today frequently have significant differences when compared with the historical reactor systems for which benchmarks are founded. Physics testing during reactor startup is the final opportunity for characterizing data uncertainty before hot full power operation. Therefore, a best practices standard is needed to provide guidance on how to leverage traditional startup procedures with software validation methods.
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