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.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
Feb 2026
Jul 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
February 2026
Nuclear Technology
January 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
DOE, General Matter team up for new fuel mission at Hanford
The Department of Energy's Office of Environmental Management (EM) on Tuesday announced a partnership with California-based nuclear fuel company General Matter for the potential use of the long-idle Fuels and Materials Examination Facility (FMEF) at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
According to the announcement, the DOE and General Matter have signed a lease to explore the FMEF's potential to be used for advanced nuclear fuel cycle technologies and materials, in part to help satisfy the predicted future requirements of artificial intelligence.
P. B. Abramson, H. H. Hummel, E. M. Gelbard, P. A. Pizzica, J. J. Sienicki
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 66 | Number 1 | April 1978 | Pages 14-23
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE78-A15184
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the use of large computers to analyze severe accidents in liquid-metal fast breeder reactors (LMFBRs), it has long been recognized that many of the fundamental phenomena cannot be precisely predicted because of uncertainty in the parameters that govern them. As a direct result, mechanistic analysis of such accidents has proceeded along a parametric path in which these variables are fixed at a certain constant value for the entire calculation: The influence of variation of this value is assessed by making a series of complete calculations with the parameter set at a different value for each such element of the series. While some parameters may be thought of as “correlated” or fixed for an entire calculation, very few are in fact constant throughout a reactor, and many are (for practical purposes) nearly completely uncorrected, either in space or time, during the hypothetical accident. Thus, such analysis has created a set of results that are not indicative or representative of an accident involving uncorrected or only partially correlated variable parameters. We describe here a methodology for dealing with various degrees of uncertainty or incoherence in these parameters. By using two very different mechanistic codes (FX2-POOL and EPIC), we demonstrate that the treatment of uncorrected parameters, such as droplet/particle size in a hypothetical core disruptive accident, as random variables with a certain probability distribution during each complete calculation of a series of calculations produces as much as an order of magnitude less uncertainty in the end result than had been obtained assuming perfect correlation. Finally, we categorize a small list of parameters as either correlated or uncorrected for some of the other LMFBR accident analysis codes. The technique we demonstrate can be easily implemented in a broad spectrum of accident analysis codes with similar benefits.