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
Aerospace Nuclear Science & Technology
Organized to promote the advancement of knowledge in the use of nuclear science and technologies in the aerospace application. Specialized nuclear-based technologies and applications are needed to advance the state-of-the-art in aerospace design, engineering and operations to explore planetary bodies in our solar system and beyond, plus enhance the safety of air travel, especially high speed air travel. Areas of interest will include but are not limited to the creation of nuclear-based power and propulsion systems, multifunctional materials to protect humans and electronic components from atmospheric, space, and nuclear power system radiation, human factor strategies for the safety and reliable operation of nuclear power and propulsion plants by non-specialized personnel and more.
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
May 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
July 2025
Nuclear Technology
June 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
High-temperature plumbing and advanced reactors
The use of nuclear fission power and its role in impacting climate change is hotly debated. Fission advocates argue that short-term solutions would involve the rapid deployment of Gen III+ nuclear reactors, like Vogtle-3 and -4, while long-term climate change impact would rely on the creation and implementation of Gen IV reactors, “inherently safe” reactors that use passive laws of physics and chemistry rather than active controls such as valves and pumps to operate safely. While Gen IV reactors vary in many ways, one thing unites nearly all of them: the use of exotic, high-temperature coolants. These fluids, like molten salts and liquid metals, can enable reactor engineers to design much safer nuclear reactors—ultimately because the boiling point of each fluid is extremely high. Fluids that remain liquid over large temperature ranges can provide good heat transfer through many demanding conditions, all with minimal pressurization. Although the most apparent use for these fluids is advanced fission power, they have the potential to be applied to other power generation sources such as fusion, thermal storage, solar, or high-temperature process heat.1–3
Zhiqiang Chen, Jingjing Chen, Shuangbao Shu, Ziqiao Yu, Yuzhong Zhang, Xiaojie Tao, Xianli Lang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 196 | Number 10 | October 2022 | Pages 1255-1265
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2072660
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Monitoring the oil scale deposition thickness of pipelines is beneficial to ensuring the efficient and safe operation of pipelines. In this paper, an improved gamma-ray transmission method is proposed to reconstruct the two-dimensional (2D) oil scale profile of pipelines. The method combines the gamma-ray transmission method and scanning technology to measure the deposition thickness of the oil scale and rotates the gamma-ray scanning direction to different angles, after completing a transmission scanning process, to achieve the full-angle measurement of the oil scale deposition thickness. Based on this method, a set of oil scale profile detection devices is designed and the detection process is simulated by the Geant4 toolkit. In this system model, the pipelines with and without oil scale are scanned, respectively, by using the single-energy gamma-ray beam to analyze the relative transmittance of gamma rays at the energy of 0.662 MeV. The results show that the approach is efficient for detecting the deposition thickness of oil scale in oil pipelines and is accurate for the 2D oil scale profile reconstruction of a pipeline. The maximum deviation is about 0.59 cm, and the relative error is less than 5%.
