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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.
Christopher M. Perfetti, Bradley T. Rearden
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 182 | Number 3 | March 2016 | Pages 354-368
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE15-13
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The sensitivity and uncertainty analysis tools of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory SCALE nuclear modeling and simulation code system that have been developed over the last decade have proven indispensable for numerous application and design studies for nuclear criticality safety and reactor physics. SCALE contains tools for analyzing the uncertainty in the eigenvalue of critical systems with realistic three-dimensional Monte Carlo simulations but currently can only quantify the uncertainty in important neutronic parameters such as multigroup cross sections, fuel fission rates, activation rates, and neutron fluence rates with one- or two-dimensional models. A more complete understanding of the sources of uncertainty in these design-limiting parameters using high-fidelity models could lead to improvements in process optimization and reactor safety and help inform regulators when setting operational safety margins. A novel approach for calculating eigenvalue sensitivity coefficients, known as the CLUTCH (Contributon-Linked eigenvalue sensitivity/Uncertainty estimation via Track length importance CHaracterization) method, was recently explored as academic research and has been found to accurately and rapidly calculate sensitivity coefficients in criticality safety applications. The work presented here describes an extension of the CLUTCH method, known as the GEneralized Adjoint Responses in Monte Carlo (GEARMC) method, that enables the calculation of sensitivity coefficients and uncertainty analysis for a generalized set of neutronic responses using high-fidelity continuous-energy Monte Carlo calculations. Several criticality safety systems were examined to demonstrate proof of principle for the GEAR-MC method, and GEAR-MC produced response sensitivity coefficients that agreed well with reference direct perturbation sensitivity coefficients.