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.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Dec 2025
Jul 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
January 2026
Nuclear Technology
December 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
November 2025
Latest News
AI at work: Southern Nuclear’s adoption of Copilot agents drives fleet forward
Southern Nuclear is leading the charge in artificial intelligence integration, with employee-developed applications driving efficiencies in maintenance, operations, safety, and performance.
The tools span all roles within the company, with thousands of documented uses throughout the fleet, including improved maintenance efficiency, risk awareness in maintenance activities, and better-informed decision-making. The data-intensive process of preparing for and executing maintenance operations is streamlined by leveraging AI to put the right information at the fingertips for maintenance leaders, planners, schedulers, engineers, and technicians.
Hoang Hai Nguyen, Jun Nishiyama, Toru Obara
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 194 | Number 12 | December 2020 | Pages 1128-1142
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1775433
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The CANDLE (Constant Axial shape of Neutron flux, nuclide densities and power shape During Life of Energy production) reactor concept was proposed to overcome the disadvantages of current reactor technologies. In this study, a Monte Carlo–based procedure is developed for quantitative comparison of burnup performance and neutronic characteristics between lead bismuth eutectic (LBE)–cooled and sodium-cooled CANDLE reactors to demonstrate the possibility of using sodium coolant in a small CANDLE burning reactor. In this procedure, a neutron transport equation is solved using the MVP code with the JENDL-4.0 library, and the burnup calculation is solved using the MVP-BURN code with the detailed burnup chain. To simulate the fuel-shuffling process, an auxiliary code was developed using Python. The results show that for the same fuel pin design and core volume, changing the coolant from LBE to sodium reduced the keff by 2.3% and the average discharge burnup by 15.6%, due to the softer neutron spectrum and larger neutron leakage fraction. It would be necessary to increase the fuel volume and core radius approximately 38% and 17%, respectively, for criticality in a sodium-cooled CANDLE core.
