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Division Spotlight
Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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
Commercial nuclear innovation "new space" age
In early 2006, a start-up company launched a small rocket from a tiny island in the Pacific. It exploded, showering the island with debris. A year later, a second launch attempt sent a rocket to space but failed to make orbit, burning up in the atmosphere. Another year brought a third attempt—and a third failure. The following month, in September 2008, the company used the last of its funds to launch a fourth rocket. It reached orbit, making history as the first privately funded liquid-fueled rocket to do so.
Cesare Frepoli
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 194 | Number 8 | August-September 2020 | Pages 825-832
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1753419
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Integral systems test (IST) facilities, which are sometimes referred to as integral effects tests (IETs), play a key role in the design, assessment, and certification of innovative reactor designs. Data obtained using such facilities have been used to benchmark the best-estimate safety analysis computer codes used to evaluate nuclear plant safety. They have also been used to assess the effectiveness of safety system functions under simulated accident conditions. Scaling analyses are an important component in determining the applicability of an evaluation model for its intended purpose. Evaluation models can only approximate the physical behavior of postulated events on a prototype, and the judgment of their adequacy relies heavily on their capability in predicting IETs that were designed to simulate the events analyzed. With few exceptions, all ISTs are subscale representations of the power plants they are built to represent. As thermal-hydraulic computer codes are benchmarked to an IST database, the most important challenge for the analyst is the development of convincing scaling similarities between the IST and the plant. Unless such rules are clearly identified, it would not be possible to extend conclusions from the assessment of the tools against subscale data to the plant scenario time and geometry scales.