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.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Nov 2025
Jul 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
December 2025
Nuclear Technology
November 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
The progress so far: An update on the Reactor Pilot Program
It has been about three months since the Department of Energy named 10 companies for its new Reactor Pilot Program, which maps out how the DOE would meet the goal announced by executive order in May of having three reactors achieve criticality by July 4, 2026.
Kyle M. Ramey, Bojan Petrovic
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 11 | November 2025 | Pages 1934-1953
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2025.2464460
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Advanced High Temperature Reactor (AHTR) is a prismatic Fluoride salt cooled High temperature Reactor (FHR) fueled by TRISO particles with a relatively large power of 3400 MW(thermal). Because of its double heterogeneity in fuel element geometry and complexity to model it, transport simulations of AHTR have mostly focused on using Monte Carlo methods. Detailed depletion studies with elements of multiphysics have not been done previously on AHTR, which created the need for a new tool to do so. A C++ script was created to enable such analyses of AHTR, including temperature feedback, thermal expansion, material property changes, and criticality search on control rod position. This paper begins with a brief summary of modeling capabilities and methodologies. Then, attention turns to depletion analysis of AHTR. In this work, five depletion cases of varying degrees of resolution and features are considered with results and comparisons presented. Three-dimensional depletion cases include single material tracking (core average), fine spatial tracking (4032 zones), thermal-hydraulic feedback substeps between burnup steps, criticality iteration substeps via control rod movement between burnup steps, and use of both criticality and thermal-hydraulic iteration substeps between burnup steps. The final case illustrates the full functionality to run detailed depletion studies in an automated fashion with elements of multiphysics. Although only applicable to AHTR, the script enables analyses not previously possible with existing tools and advances the state of the art for AHTR core design.