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
Human Factors, Instrumentation & Controls
Improving task performance, system reliability, system and personnel safety, efficiency, and effectiveness are the division's main objectives. Its major areas of interest include task design, procedures, training, instrument and control layout and placement, stress control, anthropometrics, psychological input, and motivation.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver 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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
May 2025
Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
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.