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
Nuclear Criticality Safety
NCSD provides communication among nuclear criticality safety professionals through the development of standards, the evolution of training methods and materials, the presentation of technical data and procedures, and the creation of specialty publications. In these ways, the division furthers the exchange of technical information on nuclear criticality safety with the ultimate goal of promoting the safe handling of fissionable materials outside reactors.
Meeting Spotlight
2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott 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
May 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
AI and productivity growth
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
This month’s issue of Nuclear News focuses on supply and demand. The “supply” part of the story highlights nuclear’s continued success in providing electricity to the grid more than 90 percent of the time, while the “demand” part explores the seemingly insatiable appetite of hyperscale data centers for steady, carbon-free energy.
Technically, we are in the second year of our AI epiphany, the collective realization that Big Tech’s energy demands are so large that they cannot be met without a historic build-out of new generation capacity. Yet the enormity of it all still seems hard to grasp.
or the better part of two decades, U.S. electricity demand has been flat. Sure, we’ve seen annual fluctuations that correlate with weather patterns and the overall domestic economic performance, but the gigawatt-hours of electricity America consumed in 2021 are almost identical to our 2007 numbers.
F. A. Nichols
Nuclear Technology | Volume 40 | Number 1 | August 1978 | Pages 98-105
Technical Paper | Material | doi.org/10.13182/NT78-A26703
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The essentials of radiation damage in metals and alloys are reviewed with special emphasis on the spatial distribution of the vacancies and interstitials produced. These concepts are then related to our current understanding of the phenomena of radiation hardening, radiation embrittlement, radiation creep, radiation swelling, and radiation growth. It is concluded that radiation hardening and radiation embrittlement in thermal reactors and at lower temperatures in fast reactors are best gauged by a measure of the number of primary knock-on atoms having an energy greater than some threshold energy. The other phenomena mentioned are best gauged as rate processes proportional to the rate of point defect production. No one gauge of radiation damage is best for all phenomena.
