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Division Spotlight
Nuclear Criticality Safety
NCSD provides communication among nuclear criticality safety professionals through the development of standards, the evolution of training methods and materials, the presentation of technical data and procedures, and the creation of specialty publications. In these ways, the division furthers the exchange of technical information on nuclear criticality safety with the ultimate goal of promoting the safe handling of fissionable materials outside reactors.
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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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BREAKING NEWS: Trump issues executive orders to overhaul nuclear industry
The Trump administration issued four executive orders today aimed at boosting domestic nuclear deployment ahead of significant growth in projected energy demand in the coming decades.
During a live signing in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump called nuclear “a hot industry,” adding, “It’s a brilliant industry. [But] you’ve got to do it right. It’s become very safe and environmental.”
Massimiliano Fratoni, Ehud Greenspan
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 166 | Number 1 | September 2010 | Pages 1-16
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE09-66
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The capability to perform depletion analysis of pebble bed reactors has been traditionally limited to a few dedicated codes that are designed for helium-cooled reactors, rely on pregenerated problem-dependent group cross sections, and have limited flexibility in the materials and in the geometries they can model. This paper presents a newly developed tool to search for pebble bed reactor core equilibrium composition and calculate its neutronic characteristics. It uses MCNP for transport calculations and ORIGEN2 for depletion calculations and can generate effective one-group cross sections “on-the-fly” as pebbles move through the core using point-energy cross sections. This tool can be used for any coolant type including liquid salt, can model complex geometries, and can account for any level of heterogeneity. Also developed are two simplified methodologies that are based on unit-cell analysis and can considerably reduce the required computational time; they are useful for parametric studies.