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Division Spotlight
Accelerator Applications
The division was organized to promote the advancement of knowledge of the use of particle accelerator technologies for nuclear and other applications. It focuses on production of neutrons and other particles, utilization of these particles for scientific or industrial purposes, such as the production or destruction of radionuclides significant to energy, medicine, defense or other endeavors, as well as imaging and diagnostics.
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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Latest News
Nuclear fuel cycle reimagined: Powering the next frontiers from nuclear waste
In the fall of 2023, a small Zeno Power team accomplished a major feat: they demonstrated the first strontium-90 heat source in decades—and the first-ever by a commercial company.
Zeno Power worked with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to fabricate and validate this Z1 heat source design at the lab’s Radiochemical Processing Laboratory. The Z1 demonstration heralded renewed interest in developing radioisotope power system (RPS) technology. In early 2025, the heat source was disassembled, and the Sr-90 was returned to the U.S. Department of Energy for continued use.
Ruixian Fang, Dan G. Cacuci
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 198 | Number 8 | August 2024 | Pages 1682-1737
Computer Code Abstract | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2255725
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work presents a software module called 4th-Order-SENS, which enables the efficient computation of exactly obtained expressions for all sensitivities, up to and including the 4th order, of a functional of the particle flux (e.g., the leakage of particles out of a body) with respect to nuclear parameters (total, scattering, and fission cross sections; nu, chi, sources; and number densities) for systems modeled by the neutron transport equation. The 4th-Order-SENS module implements the nth-Order Comprehensive Adjoint Sensitivity Analysis Methodology for Linear Systems (nth-CASAM-L), which is the only practically implementable methodology for obtaining the exact expressions of arbitrarily high-order sensitivities of model responses to model parameters, for response-coupled forward/adjoint large-scale linear systems. In addition to presenting the equations that are solved to obtain the 1st-order through 4th-order sensitivities, this work also describes the components of the module 4th-Order-SENS, including the user interface, input file, output files, and several independent code verification capabilities using symmetries and/or finite-difference formulas. The 4th-Order-SENS module is written in Python and Fortran and runs on Linux platforms. Several illustrative applications involving fixed-source problems in one-dimensional spherical and slab geometries are also presented.