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
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver 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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
May 2025
Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
Ryan Kelly, Dan Ilas
Nuclear Technology | Volume 183 | Number 3 | September 2013 | Pages 391-397
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A19427
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This study describes a new approach employing the Dancoff correction method to model the TRISO-based fuel form used by the Advanced High-Temperature Reactor (AHTR) design concept. The Dancoff correction method is used to perform isotope depletion analysis using the TRITON sequence of SCALE and is verified by code-to-code comparisons. The current AHTR fuel design has TRISO particles concentrated along the edges of a slab fuel element. This geometry prevented the use of the DOUBLEHET treatment, previously developed in SCALE to model spherical and cylindrical fuel. The new method permits fuel depletion on complicated geometries that traditionally can be handled only by continuous-energy-based depletion code systems. The method was initially tested on a fuel configuration typical of the Next Generation Nuclear Plant, where DOUBLEHET treatment is possible. A confirmatory study was performed on the AHTR reference core geometry using the VESTA code, which uses the continuous-energy MCNP5 code as a transport solver and ORIGEN2.2 code for depletion calculations. Comparisons of the results indicate good agreement of whole-core characteristics, such as the multiplication factor and the isotopics, including their spatial distribution. Key isotopes analyzed included 235U, 239Pu, 240Pu, and 241Pu. The results from this study indicate that the Dancoff factor method can generate estimates of core characteristics with reasonable precision for scoping studies of configurations where DOUBLEHET treatment cannot be performed.
