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
Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
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!
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Nuclear Science and Engineering
July 2025
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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
Rodolfo M. Ferrer, Joshua M. Hykes
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 2 | February 2023 | Pages 333-350
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2053491
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Spatially Dependent Self-Shielding (SDSS) method has been implemented into CASMO5 within the framework of Equivalence Theory. The Optimal Two-Term Rational (OTTR) approximation is extended in the SDSS method to the Stoker-Weiss treatment of concentric annular fuel subdivisions. Reference fuel-to-fuel probabilities are required by the OTTR and obtained by performing a series of fixed-source, two-dimensional transport calculations for individual pin cell types using the method of characteristics. Several algorithms used in searching for the OTTR coefficients are evaluated with the goal of obtaining the best practical accuracy at minimal computational cost. Numerical results are presented that provide a comparison of various choices of search algorithms and show improved accuracy obtained by increasing the degrees of freedom in the rational approximation. Spatial profiles of the 238U microscopic absorption cross sections in the resonance range obtained using the Distributed Resonance Integral (DRI) and SDSS methods are compared to reference results from Monte Carlo calculations. The comparison highlights the inherent advantages of SDSS over the previous DRI method.
