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
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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
Sep 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
October 2025
Latest News
Shifting the paradigm of supply chain
Chad Wolf
When I began my nuclear career, I was coached up in the nuclear energy culture of the day to “run silent, run deep,” a mindset rooted in the U.S. Navy’s submarine philosophy. That was the norm—until Fukushima.
The nuclear renaissance that many had envisioned hit a wall. The focus shifted from expansion to survival. Many utility communications efforts pivoted from silence to broadcast, showcasing nuclear energy’s elegance and reliability. Nevertheless, despite being clean baseload 24/7 power that delivered a 90 percent capacity factor or higher, nuclear energy was painted as risky and expensive (alongside energy policies and incentives that favored renewables).
Economics became a driving force threatening to shutter nuclear power. The Delivering the Nuclear Promise initiative launched in 2015 challenged the industry to sustain high performance yet cut costs by up to 30 percent.
V. Subramanian, R. Baskaran, J. Misra, R. Indira
Nuclear Technology | Volume 176 | Number 1 | October 2011 | Pages 83-92
Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A12544
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In core disruptive accident conditions of sodium-cooled fast reactors, the reactor containment building (RCB) is filled with a large amount of sodium aerosols, along with fuel and fission product aerosols. The environmental source term depends on the quantity of aerosols released from RCB, which in turn depends on the quantity of aerosols that remains suspended in the RCB volume. The sodium aerosols are generated by the combustion process, resulting in micrometer-sized aerosols, while fuel and fission product aerosols are generated by vaporization condensation, resulting in nanometer-sized aerosols. To ascertain the behavior of mixed aerosols generated by the different processes, experiments are conducted by generating sodium aerosols and nonradioactive fission product aerosols and then studying their behavior in a closed vessel. The study includes (a) the initial size distribution of CeO2 and SrO2 aerosols, (b) the behavior of suspended mass concentration as a function of time, and (c) the behavior of suspended number concentration as a function of time. The initial size of the sodium combustion aerosols is [approximately]1.0 m, whereas the initial size of the fuel and fission product aerosols is nanometer sized ([approximately]30 nm). In the context of the behavior of the two different-sized aerosols, sodium aerosol behavior dominates the overall suspended mass concentration of the system. The rate of change of number concentration exhibits two regions. The timescale involved for the Brownian coagulation region is found to be [approximately]80 min for nonradioactive fission product aerosols, whereas it lasts only 20 to 30 min when the aerosol system is mixed with sodium aerosols.
