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
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
Dec 2025
Jul 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
January 2026
Nuclear Technology
December 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
November 2025
Latest News
AI at work: Southern Nuclear’s adoption of Copilot agents drives fleet forward
Southern Nuclear is leading the charge in artificial intelligence integration, with employee-developed applications driving efficiencies in maintenance, operations, safety, and performance.
The tools span all roles within the company, with thousands of documented uses throughout the fleet, including improved maintenance efficiency, risk awareness in maintenance activities, and better-informed decision-making. The data-intensive process of preparing for and executing maintenance operations is streamlined by leveraging AI to put the right information at the fingertips for maintenance leaders, planners, schedulers, engineers, and technicians.
P. Köhler, J. Ligou
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 54 | Number 3 | July 1974 | Pages 357-360
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE74-A23426
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Calculations of neutron streaming in gas-cooled fast reactors (GCFR) designed with fuel pins have not been made properly up to now. The usual approach for computing the diffusion coefficients fails for two reasons: (a) the voided region is located at the cell boundary, and (b) the pitch is such that two-dimensional infinite gaps extend through the reactor. For an infinite lattice, the diffusion coefficient will diverge, which means that, in principle, the diffusion theory is no longer valid. This fact has been more or less forgotten because most theories assume cylindrical cells and therefore remove this difficulty artificially. Introducing the real size of the reactor at the beginning, a new theory of the streaming, which generalizes the usual approach is developed; it appears as a buckling dependent term in the diffusion coefficient which diverges slowly for an infinite lattice. Fortunately, this term is small for usual reactor sizes, and one may, therefore, continue to use diffusion theory for practical calculations. The numerical applications to GCFR lattices show that the streaming was underestimated in the past.