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
ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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
Feb 2025
Jul 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
February 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Argonne scientists use AI to detect hidden defects in stainless steel
Imagine you’re constructing a bridge or designing an airplane, and everything appears flawless on the outside. However, microscopic flaws beneath the surface could weaken the entire structure over time.
These hidden defects can be difficult to detect with traditional inspection methods, but a new technology developed by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory is changing that. Using artificial intelligence and advanced imaging techniques, researchers have developed a method to reveal these tiny flaws before they become critical problems.
J. M. Canik, X.-Z. Tang
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 1 | January 2017 | Pages 103-109
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST16-124
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
While the sensitivity of the scrape-off layer and divertor plasma to the highly uncertain cross-field transport assumptions is widely recognized, the plasma is also sensitive to the details of the plasma-material interface (PMI) models used as part of comprehensive predictive simulations. Here, these PMI sensitivities are studied by varying the relevant submodels within the SOLPS plasma transport code. Two aspects are explored: the sheath model used as a boundary condition in SOLPS, and fast particle reflection rates for ions impinging on a material surface. Both of these have been the study of recent high-fidelity simulation efforts aimed at improving the understanding and prediction of these phenomena. It is found that in both cases quantitative changes to the plasma solution result from modification of the PMI model, with a larger impact in the case of the reflection coefficient variation. This indicates the necessities to better quantify the uncertainties within the PMI models themselves and to perform thorough sensitivity analysis to propagate these throughout the boundary model; this is especially important for validation against experiment, where the error in the simulation is a critical and less-studied piece of the code-experiment comparison.