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Division Spotlight
Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
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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AI and productivity growth
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
This month’s issue of Nuclear News focuses on supply and demand. The “supply” part of the story highlights nuclear’s continued success in providing electricity to the grid more than 90 percent of the time, while the “demand” part explores the seemingly insatiable appetite of hyperscale data centers for steady, carbon-free energy.
Technically, we are in the second year of our AI epiphany, the collective realization that Big Tech’s energy demands are so large that they cannot be met without a historic build-out of new generation capacity. Yet the enormity of it all still seems hard to grasp.
or the better part of two decades, U.S. electricity demand has been flat. Sure, we’ve seen annual fluctuations that correlate with weather patterns and the overall domestic economic performance, but the gigawatt-hours of electricity America consumed in 2021 are almost identical to our 2007 numbers.
Jin Li, Volkan Seker, Andrew Ward, Thomas Downar
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 5 | May 2025 | Pages 772-792
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2024.2397621
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Monte Carlo codes have become increasingly popular for generating homogenized few-group cross-section data, especially for advanced reactor designs that have complex geometries and nontraditional compositions. However, the stochastic nature of Monte Carlo processes has the potential to introduce additional statistical uncertainties in the overall uncertainty in the prediction of core behavior. The work performed in this research quantified the additional uncertainty introduced by the use of Monte Carlo multigroup cross sections into the analysis of graphite-moderated pebble bed reactors. In this research, the objective was achieved by performing uncertainty quantification for the key output parameters in deterministic steady-state and transient safety calculations. The results show that when the homogenized multigroup cross sections are generated with a sufficient number of neutron histories in the Monte Carlo calculation, the uncertainties in the subsequent deterministic simulations caused by the Monte Carlo cross-section uncertainty are negligible compared to the contributions from the uncertainties of other input parameters.