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
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2026
Jan 2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
May 2026
Nuclear Technology
March 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Access anywhere, anytime: Nuclear power, Ice Camp, and Rickover’s enduring standard of excellence
Admiral William Houston
As U.S. Navy submarines surface through Arctic ice during Ice Camp 2026, they demonstrate more than operational proficiency in one of the harshest environments on Earth. They reaffirm a technological truth first proven in August 1958, when the USS Nautilus completed its submerged transit of the North Pole: nuclear power enables access anywhere, anytime.
The Arctic is unforgiving, with vast distances, extreme cold, shifting ice, and no logistical infrastructure. Conventional propulsion is constrained by fuel, air, and endurance. Nuclear propulsion removes those constraints. Only a nuclear-powered submarine can operate anywhere in the world’s oceans, including under the polar ice, undetected and at maximum capability for extended periods. Nuclear power provides sustained high speed and the endurance to reposition across the globe without refueling.
Michitsugu Mori
Nuclear Technology | Volume 148 | Number 1 | October 2004 | Pages 12-24
Technical Paper | RETRAN | doi.org/10.13182/NT04-A3544
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Two advanced boiling water reactors (ABWRs) whose electric output power is 1356 MW have been commercially operated since 1996 and 1997 by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) in Japan. Features of an ABWR are reactor internal pumps (RIPs) placed in the lower plenum and downcomer, peripherally bottom-mounted on the reactor pressure vessel - which should require different modeling from the jet pumps and two recirculation pumps in the primary outer-loop recirculations of BWR-5.Efforts focused on modeling and simulating the ABWR with transient analyses by the point-kinetics model with the local reactivity modified by local importance weighting of the squared nodal power during start-up tests using the RETRAN-3D code, version MOD003 without three-dimensional kinetics. The core and reactor pressure vessel including ten ABWR RIPs and the steam lines were modeled, and simulations were carried out for the cases of the one-pump trip test, the changing-setpoint tests, the main-steam-isolation-valve-closure test, and the generator load rejection test with bypass.The analytical simulation with RETRAN-3D/MOD003 well reproduced the measured data of the ABWR in operation for the RIP trip and the transient tests and could demonstrate its validation for applying to the ABWR with modeling of RIPs.