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
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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
Aug 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2025
Nuclear Technology
August 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
No impact from Savannah River radioactive wasps
The news is abuzz with recent news stories about four radioactive wasp nests found at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The site has been undergoing cleanup operations since the 1990s related to the production of plutonium and tritium for defense purposes during the Cold War. Cleanup activities are expected to continue into the 2060s.
Jose March-Leuba, Dan G. Cacuci, Rafael B. Perez
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 93 | Number 2 | June 1986 | Pages 111-123
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE86-A17663
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A phenomenological model has been developed to simulate the qualitative behavior of boiling water reactors (BWRs) in the nonlinear regime under deterministic and stochastic excitations. After the linear stability threshold is crossed, limit cycle oscillations appear due to interactions between two unstable equilibrium points and the phase-space trajectories. This limit cycle becomes unstable when the feedback gain exceeds a certain critical value. Subsequent limit cycle instabilities produce a cascade of period-doubling bifurcations that lead to aperiodic pulsed behavior. Under stochastic excitations, BWRs exhibit a single characteristic resonance, at ∼0.5 Hz, in the linear regime. By contrast, this work shows that harmonics of this characteristic frequency appear in the nonlinear regime. Furthermore, this work also demonstrates that amplitudes of the limit cycle oscillations do not depend on the variance of the stochastic excitation and remain bounded at all times.