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 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2026
Jan 2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
May 2026
Nuclear Technology
February 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
OSTP memo guides space nuclear plan
A White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memorandum released on Tuesday guides NASA, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Defense on their roles in deploying near-term space nuclear power.
This follows a series of NASA announcements last month—driven by the executive order “Ensuring American Space Superiority,” issued by Trump in December—including an ambitious timeline for establishing a moon base, which would rely on fission surface power (FSP) to survive the long lunar night at the moon’s south pole, and plans for a nuclear electric propulsion (NEP) rocket to be launched in 2028.
Ruihan Li, Junyi Chen, Aixin Zhu, Jingang Liang, Ding She, Hongjian Zhang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 11 | November 2025 | Pages 1954-1970
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2025.2471712
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Simulating pebble bed reactors with high fidelity presents significant challenges because of the intricate geometry of the randomly packed pebbles and the requirement for multiphysics coupling. This study introduces an innovative modeling framework that couples neutronics, thermal hydraulics, and pebble flow dynamics of the reactor core. The Monte Carlo (MC) code, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method, and discrete element method (DEM) are used, utilizing the open-source codes OpenMC, OpenFOAM, and LAMMPS, respectively. The core geometry is explicitly constructed for both the MC and the DEM models, while a porous media approach is adopted for the CFD model to manage computational expenses. Enhancements have been made to OpenMC to facilitate data exchange: The core geometry is allowed to change between depletion steps to simulate pebble motion, and a temperature mesh scheme has been developed for efficient temperature distribution transfer. Validations are provided for the models and modifications implemented in this study. As a practical demonstration, a depletion simulation on a full-core model of a High-Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor–Pebble-Bed Module (HTR-PM) is conducted, explicitly modeling 420 000 randomly packed fuel pebbles. The results reveal detailed distributions of power, temperature, and burnup, all consistent with expected physical behavior, underscoring the effectiveness of our approach.