ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
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Division Spotlight
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
Meeting Spotlight
2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott 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
BREAKING NEWS: Trump issues executive orders to overhaul nuclear industry
The Trump administration issued four executive orders today aimed at boosting domestic nuclear deployment ahead of significant growth in projected energy demand in the coming decades.
During a live signing in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump called nuclear “a hot industry,” adding, “It’s a brilliant industry. [But] you’ve got to do it right. It’s become very safe and environmental.”
Alberto Talamo, Waclaw Gudowski
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 153 | Number 2 | June 2006 | Pages 172-183
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE06-A2603
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the future development of nuclear energy, the graphite-moderated helium-cooled reactors may play an important role because of their valuable technical advantages: passive safety, low cost, flexibility in the choice of fuel, high conversion energy efficiency, high burnup, more resistant fuel cladding, and low power density. General Atomics possesses a long experience with this type of reactor, and it has recently developed the gas turbine-modular helium reactor (GT-MHR), a design where the nuclear power plant is structured into four reactor modules of 600 MW(thermal). Amid its benefits, the GT-MHR offers a rather large flexibility in the choice of fuel type; Th, U, and Pu may be used in the manufacture of fuel with some degrees of freedom. As a consequence, the fuel management may be designed for different objectives aside from energy production, e.g., the reduction of actinide waste production through a fuel based on thorium. In our previous studies we analyzed the behavior of the GT-MHR with a plutonium fuel based on light water reactor (LWR) waste; in the present study we focused on the incineration of military Pu. This choice of fuel requires a detailed numerical modeling of the reactor since a high value of keff at the beginning of the reactor operation requires the modeling both of control rods and of burnable poison; by contrast, when the GT-MHR is fueled with LWR waste, at the equilibrium of the fuel composition, the reactivity swing is small.