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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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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Powering the future: How the DOE is fueling nuclear fuel cycle research and development
As global interest in nuclear energy surges, the United States must remain at the forefront of research and development to ensure national energy security, advance nuclear technologies, and promote international cooperation on safety and nonproliferation. A crucial step in achieving this is analyzing how funding and resources are allocated to better understand how to direct future research and development. The Department of Energy has spearheaded this effort by funding hundreds of research projects across the country through the Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP). This initiative has empowered dozens of universities to collaborate toward a nuclear-friendly future.
Felix C. Difilippo
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 143 | Number 3 | March 2003 | Pages 240-253
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE02-34
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a series of well-documented benchmark experiments were performed at the Proteus facility of the Swiss Paul Scherrer Institute. Thirteen critical pebble bed reactor configurations were assembled, with ten of them deterministic with a precise location of the low-enriched fuel and moderator pebbles. Seven of these configurations were modeled with a very high spatial resolution with the Monte Carlo code MCNP with details that go from the fuel kernel (0.5 mm in diameter) to the walls surrounding the facility. The calculations of the k's of the configurations agree quite well with the experiments (within a fraction of a dollar). A sensitivity analysis is included to discuss the possibility of a small bias; also biases introduced by customary approximations of production codes were calculated. The experiments and the analysis of this paper might be very useful tools to check the calculational accuracy of procedures used in the emerging work related to pebble bed modular gas-cooled reactors.