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
Aerospace Nuclear Science & Technology
Organized to promote the advancement of knowledge in the use of nuclear science and technologies in the aerospace application. Specialized nuclear-based technologies and applications are needed to advance the state-of-the-art in aerospace design, engineering and operations to explore planetary bodies in our solar system and beyond, plus enhance the safety of air travel, especially high speed air travel. Areas of interest will include but are not limited to the creation of nuclear-based power and propulsion systems, multifunctional materials to protect humans and electronic components from atmospheric, space, and nuclear power system radiation, human factor strategies for the safety and reliable operation of nuclear power and propulsion plants by non-specialized personnel and more.
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!
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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.
Tamotsu Hayase, Hiroshi Motoda
Nuclear Technology | Volume 48 | Number 2 | April 1980 | Pages 91-100
Technical Paper | Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT80-A32455
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
OPROD, a computer code for automatic generation of control rod programming that has successfully been applied to an older boiling water reactor (BWR), has experienced some difficulties when applied to a BWR of larger power density and stronger heterogeneity. To improve the performance, a heuristic algorithm that is derived from accumulated experience has been introduced to search for a feasible rod pattern that satisfies all constraints. Application of this algorithm to an initial cycle of an 800-MW(electric) BWR of high heterogeneity has been very successful. It has been demonstrated that the proposed algorithm is capable of finding a feasible rod pattern, even starting from an all-rods-out pattern. Some improvement was also made in the method of approximation programming (MAP) algorithm. The temporal constraint relaxation method is shown to be effective in finding an optimal control rod pattern in MAP starting from a guess pattern that is not feasible.
