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.
Division Spotlight
Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
Meeting Spotlight
2023 ANS Annual Meeting
June 11–14, 2023
Indianapolis, IN|Marriott Indianapolis 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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2023
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
July 2023
Latest News
The Civil Nuclear Credit Program: An overview
Officially established on November 15, 2021, with the signing of the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act—aka the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, or BIL—the Department of Energy’s Civil Nuclear Credit Program was designed to give owners/operators of commercial U.S. reactors the opportunity to apply for certification and competitively bid on credits to help support the continued operation of economically troubled units. Finally, the federal government, and not just certain farsighted state governments, would recognize nuclear energy for its important grid reliability and decarbonization attributes.
Michael D. Zentner, George Pomeroy, Robert A. Bari, Giacomo G. M. Cojazzi, Eckhart Haas, Thomas Killeen, P. Peterson, Jeremy J. Whitlock, Edward F. Wonder
Nuclear Technology | Volume 179 | Number 1 | July 2012 | Pages 106-111
Technical Paper | Special Issue on Safeguards / Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT12-A14071
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Proliferation resistance (PR) evaluations of nuclear energy systems provide a structured approach for assessing the value of both intrinsic and extrinsic barriers to proliferation. Ultimately, PR studies allow an evaluation of proposed safeguards, an identification of potential weaknesses or alternative safeguard approaches, and a basis for improving and enhancing safeguards. To facilitate understanding and sharing of results, PR evaluations should be carried out following a standardized approach that has international acceptance and that provides consistent results independent of the analysts carrying out the evaluation. Proliferation assessment methodologies such as those being developed under the Generation IV International Forum (GIF) and IAEA's International Project on Innovative Nuclear Reactors and Fuel Cycles (INPRO) provide the technical platforms for supporting overall evaluations, but their findings are unlikely to be directly used by decision makers. This situation arises because although all PR evaluation approaches develop valuable information about the proliferation resistance of a nuclear energy system, a significant effort is still required to make results of PR evaluations usable and understandable to decision makers. This paper identifies a reference set of decision makers and other users who could be informed by the results of PR assessments. Whether the INPRO, GIF, or another methodology is used, the need for useful information about the PR of their systems must be met. The paper examines the information needs of different classes of decision makers and presents ideas on how the results of the various PR studies can be interpreted and presented to them in a more usable, understandable fashion.