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Division Spotlight
Robotics & Remote Systems
The Mission of the Robotics and Remote Systems Division is to promote the development and application of immersive simulation, robotics, and remote systems for hazardous environments for the purpose of reducing hazardous exposure to individuals, reducing environmental hazards and reducing the cost of performing work.
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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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Federal Power Act amendments focus on grid reliability
Fedorchak
North Dakota’s sole member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Republican freshman Congresswoman Julie Fedorchak, has introduced the Baseload Reliability Protection Act.
The bill aims to “amend the Federal Power Act to prohibit retirements of baseload electric generating units in any area that is served by a Regional Transmission Organization or an Independent System Operator and that the North American Electric Reliability Corporation [NERC] categorizes as at elevated risk or high risk of electricity supply shortfalls, and for other purposes.”
A summary of the legislation is available on Fedorchak’s House website.
Amendments: The Baseload Reliability Protection Act would amend the Federal Power Act in the following ways:
Mark R. Gilbert
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 1 | April 2025 | Pages S744-S753
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2024.2342506
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Modern nuclear physics software is well validated, providing advanced capabilities to support the engineering of the future generations of fission and fusion reactors. Transport simulators can model the transport of neutrons through reactor geometries, and inventory codes can accurately predict transmutation and activation. Meanwhile, material modeling applies a variety of techniques to understand how structural damage and composition changes will alter the properties of materials, ultimately limiting their usable lifetime in a reactor. Bridging the gap between nuclear simulation tools and materials modeling is a necessary step if these lifetimes are to be accurately predicted, which, for fusion, is critical to provide the necessary assurance of commercial viability. SPECTRA-PKA is a tool developed to compute the rates of structural damage source events, i.e. the primary knock-on atoms (PKAs), using the same nuclear data as used by transport and inventory simulations. Now, it has been interfaced with the binary collision approximation code SDTrimSP, allowing those PKA events, distributed spatially and temporally in an atomic system, to be converted into damage cascades. This computational infrastructure provides insight into the variation in damage distributions between different materials under the same nuclear environment. Example simulations for materials under fusion reactor conditions demonstrate how the rich detail of the nuclear environment can be applied directly to modeling, without the need for integral-average measures that omit those details.