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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
Meeting Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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
NRC cuts fees by 50 percent for advanced reactor applicants
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has announced it has amended regulations for the licensing, inspection, special projects, and annual fees it will charge applicants and licensees for fiscal year 2025.
John Stamatakos, Biswajit Dasgupta, Osvaldo Pensado, Nilesh Chokshi, Robert Budnitz, M. K. Ravindra
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 11 | November 2023 | Pages 2743-2750
PSA 2021 Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2158701
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The commercial nuclear power plant industry initiated the licensing modernization project (LMP) to enhance the risk-informed and performance-based (RIPB) regulatory basis for advanced nuclear power reactors. The LMP framework relies heavily on RIPB concepts and approaches that together integrate the defense-in-depth philosophy. One example approach for seismic design is to align the LMP concepts with the performance targets described in the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) standard, ASCE 43-19. The underlying strategy of this approach is to consider the performance of individual structures, systems, and components (SSCs) in seismic design, as well as the role they play in an accident event sequence. This approach contrasts with current regulations, in which every individual safety-related SSC is designed to the same seismic criteria irrespective of the role the SSC plays in the overall system performance. This new philosophy envisions more flexible seismic design options for each SSC, such that the overall seismic design can meet system-level acceptability criteria as well as plant-level acceptability criteria. The objective of this paper is to illustrate the flexibility and benefits of this proposed approach to the seismic design of SSCs in terms of reduced SSC demands (by reducing the design ground motions for SSCs) and improved SSC capacities (by allowing for alternative damage state limits). A simple shear wall was designed using ASCE 43-19 for a hard rock site in the Central Eastern United States considering alternate seismic design category and limit state combinations to examine the physical designs and functional fragilities of these combinations and their impact on seismic performance. The flexibility of this proposed approach is illustrated by an example that shows reduced SSC demands, while the SSC capacities and margins remain consistent with the required safety performance without any loss in overall plant safety.