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
Materials Science & Technology
The objectives of MSTD are: promote the advancement of materials science in Nuclear Science Technology; support the multidisciplines which constitute it; encourage research by providing a forum for the presentation, exchange, and documentation of relevant information; promote the interaction and communication among its members; and recognize and reward its members for significant contributions to the field of materials science in nuclear technology.
Meeting Spotlight
Conference on Nuclear Training and Education: A Biennial International Forum (CONTE 2025)
February 3–6, 2025
Amelia Island, FL|Omni Amelia Island Resort
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
December 2024
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
November 2024
Latest News
Acceleron Fusion raises $24M in seed funding to advance low-temp fusion
Cambridge, Mass.–based fusion startup Acceleron Fusion announced that it has closed a $24 million Series A funding round co-led by Lowercarbon Capital and Collaborative Fund. According to Acceleron, the funding will fuel the company’s efforts to advance its low-temperature muon-catalyzed fusion technology.
Tracy E. Stover, Paul J. Turinsky
Nuclear Technology | Volume 180 | Number 2 | November 2012 | Pages 216-230
Technical Paper | Radiation Measurements and General Instrumentation | doi.org/10.13182/NT12-A14635
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The safe and economical design of new, innovative nuclear reactors will require uncertainty reduction in basic nuclear data that are input to simulations used during reactor design. These data uncertainties propagate to uncertainties in design responses, which in turn require the reactor designer to incorporate additional safety margins into the design, often increasing the cost of the reactor. Therefore, basic nuclear data need to be improved, and this is accomplished through experimentation, which is often done using cold critical experiments. Considering the high cost of nuclear experiments, it is desired to have an optimized experiment that will provide the experimental data needed for maximum uncertainty reduction in the design responses. However, the optimization of the experiment is coupled to the reactor design itself because with reduced uncertainty in the design responses the reactor design can be re-optimized. It is thus desired to find the experiment design that gives the most optimized reactor design. Solution of this nested optimization problem is made possible by the use of the simulated annealing algorithm. Cost values for experiment design specifications and reactor design specifications are estimated and used to compute a total savings by comparing the a posteriori reactor cost to the a priori cost accounting for the offsetting cost of the experiment. This was done for the Argonne National Laboratory-developed Advanced Burner Test Reactor design concept employing a modified Zero Power Physics Reactor as the experimental facility.