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.
Robert E. Einziger, Sharon D. Atkin, David E. Stellrecht, V. Pasupathi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 57 | Number 1 | April 1982 | Pages 65-80
Technical Paper | Nuclear Fuel | doi.org/10.13182/NT82-A16187
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Postirradiation studies on failure mechanisms of well-characterized pressurized water reactor rods were conducted for up to a year at 482, 510, and 571°C in limited air and inert gas atmospheres. No cladding breaches occurred even though the tests operated many orders of magnitude longer in time than the lifetime predicted by Blackburn’s analyses. The extended lifetime is due to significant creep strain of the Zircaloy cladding, which decreases the internal rod pressure. The cladding creep also contributes to radial cracks, through the external oxide and internal fuel-cladding chemical interaction layers, which propagated into and arrested in an oxygen stabilized alpha-Zircaloy layer. There were no signs of either additional cladding hydriding, stress corrosion cracking, or fuel pellet degradation. If irradiation hardening does not reduce the stress rupture properties of Zircaloy, a conservative maximum storage temperature of 400°C based on a stress-rupture mechanism is recommended to ensure a 1000-yr cladding lifetime.
