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
Utility Working Conference and Vendor Technology Expo (UWC 2024)
August 4–7, 2024
Marco Island, FL|JW Marriott Marco Island
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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2024
Nuclear Technology
August 2024
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Taking shape: Fusion energy ecosystems built with public-private partnerships
It’s possible to describe fusion in simple terms: heat and squeeze small atoms to get abundant clean energy. But there’s nothing simple about getting fusion ready for the grid.
Private developers, national lab and university researchers, suppliers, and end users working toward that goal are developing a range of complex technologies to reach fusion temperatures and pressures, confounded by science and technology gaps linked to plasma behavior; materials, diagnostics, and electronics for extreme environments; fuel cycle sustainability; and economics.
David J. Kropaczek, Ryan Walden
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 193 | Number 5 | May 2019 | Pages 506-522
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2018.1554173
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A method is developed, assessed, and demonstrated for addressing objective functions and constraints within the context of combinatorial optimization problems. The penalty-free method developed, referred to as constraint annealing, eliminates the use of traditional constraint penalty factors by treating the objective functions and constraints as separate and concurrently solved minimization problems within a global optimization search framework. The basis of the constraint annealing algorithm is a highly scalable method based on the method of parallel simulated annealing with mixing of states. Unique to constraint annealing is a novel approach that employs both global solution acceptance and local objective function and constraint statistics in the calculation of adaptive cooling temperatures that are specific to each objective function and constraint. The constraint annealing method is assessed against a traditional penalty-factor approach for a realistic core loading pattern design problem and shown to be robust with respect to elimination of arbitrary weighting factors on constraint values. In addition, the constraint annealing method is demonstrated to be robust with respect to parallel scaling as well as improved optimization performance on high-performance-computing systems.