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
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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.
Christophe Suteau, Maurice Chiron, Gilles Arnaud
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 147 | Number 1 | May 2004 | Pages 43-55
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE04-A2417
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This study proposes an improvement of the general formalism for calculating gamma-ray buildup factors in multilayer shields developed by Assad et al. The main modification concerns the treatment of the double-layer shield formed by the two first layers of a multilayer shield. Instead of replacing the double-layer shield with an equivalent thickness of the layer of the second material, the improved general formalism replaces it with a single-layer shield made of an appropriate material. The determination of the appropriate material is implemented into MERCURE-6.1 thanks to neural networks trained on a large set of various configurations.One-dimensional comparisons with the TWODANT transport Sn code shows the accuracy of the new formalism for shields composed of three and five layers. Indeed, for three-layer shields with an infinitesimal second layer and for multilayer shields composed of numerous thin layers (more than 15), MERCURE-6.1 matches the reference data quite well. The MERCURE-6.1 ability to solve three-dimensional realistic cases is highlighted by comparisons to the TRIPOLI-4 and MCNP-4C Monte Carlo codes.
