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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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!
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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.
David A. Pickett, William L. Dam
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 151 | Number 1 | September 2005 | Pages 114-120
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE05-A2533
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is independently evaluating technical issues such as colloid-facilitated radionuclide transport in preparation for reviewing an anticipated license application from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for a potential high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. For performance assessment computer simulations of evolving conditions many years into the future, the influence of colloids in enhancing radionuclide transport is difficult to estimate and highly uncertain. NRC staff is conducting a multipronged approach to assessing whether or not these uncertainties are sufficiently represented by performance assessment models. Preliminary simplified calculations providing a conservative estimate of calculated dose from colloidal Pu suggest that an effect on dose is plausible. A more sophisticated effort involves analytical modeling of colloidal Pu transport that uses laboratory and field data to represent more accurately processes such as kinetic controls on sorption (attachment) and desorption (detachment) of radionuclides at colloid surfaces. This modeling effort shows that slow desorption of radionuclides from colloids is a factor that could enhance radionuclide migration. Finally, an abstraction of colloidal transport is being implemented in the NRC total-system performance assessment model in order to integrate potential colloidal effects at the system level. This implementation is flexible enough that a variety of sensitivity studies can be conducted that will aid identification of the model parameters most significant to transport.