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Conference Spotlight
2026 Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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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November 2025
Latest News
Star Trek or Planet of the Apes?
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
These days, the ship of civil nuclear technology we are all aboard is sailing through a turbulent passage. The winds and currents are favorable, but there are swells ahead: steep energy-demand projections, buoyant equity valuations, splashy announcements, a generational realignment of nuclear policies and institutional norms.
Part of the reason we chose “Building the Nuclear Century” as the theme for this year’s Winter Conference was to put some ballast in the hull of the nuclear conversation.
Advanced nuclear fission and fusion energy development are accelerating, both here and around the world. And yet, at least in the U.S., we are still years away from connecting commercial Gen IV systems to our grid.
In a world growing increasingly impatient, how do we stay on task and deliver? There are three ingredients to success.
D. Leichtle, U. Fischer, C. Bachmann
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 77 | Number 7 | November 2021 | Pages 773-783
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2021.1887716
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the main aims of the European fusion programme is the design of a DEMOnstration fusion power plant (DEMO). The related work is conducted by the EUROfusion consortium and includes a strong supporting research and development programme. Support is also provided to the design of the high intense neutron source IFMIF-DONES (International Fusion Material Irradiation Facility-DEMO Oriented NEutron Source) to be built for the qualification of materials considered for DEMO. Neutronics plays a fundamental role for the design, operation, and safety of these facilities including the evaluation and verification of their nuclear performance.
The lessons learned during the ITER design and construction phase point to the need to strengthen nuclear design integration already in the early DEMO design phase and establish an improved nuclear safety culture. This requires a coordinated approach for the neutronics that relies upon the availability of suitable computational procedures, tools, and data, qualified and validated for specific design- and safety-related applications. Accordingly, the approach builds on the development of advanced computation tools and the provision of high-quality nuclear data supported by integral experiments for their validation. Furthermore, configuration and requirement management principles ensure the alignment with the global nuclear design integration. This translates into appropriately chosen design margins and acceptance criteria, along with the specification of the nuclear analyses to be conducted in the various design phases.
This paper presents the outlined approach as implemented in the EUROfusion Power Plant Physics and Technology (PPPT) programme and provides a strategical outlook of planned activities. This includes development works on advanced simulation tools with their application in various nuclear design- and safety-related analyses. The efforts to improve the nuclear database, in particular, with regard to radiation damage and activation cross-section data relevant to DEMO and DONES, are highlighted. Furthermore, the methodological approach applied to PPPT nuclear analyses including design, shielding, activation, and radiation dose calculations is discussed on the basis of specific examples.
