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
October 2025
Nuclear Technology
September 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
PR: American Nuclear Society welcomes Senate confirmation of Ted Garrish as the DOE’s nuclear energy secretary
Washington, D.C. — The American Nuclear Society (ANS) applauds the U.S. Senate's confirmation of Theodore “Ted” Garrish as Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
“On behalf of over 11,000 professionals in the fields of nuclear science and technology, the American Nuclear Society congratulates Mr. Garrish on being confirmed by the Senate to once again lead the DOE Office of Nuclear Energy,” said ANS President H.M. "Hash" Hashemian.
Sunil D. Weerakkody
Nuclear Technology | Volume 186 | Number 2 | May 2014 | Pages 139-144
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-39
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Until the late 1990s, inspection and enforcement practices at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) were minimally influenced by probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) results. In the late 1990s, the NRC noted various shortcomings of the licensee assessment process [commonly known as the systematic assessment of licensee performance (SALP)] established in 1980. For example, the SALP process was found to lack focus on the most safety important issues and was subjective. The resulting new reactor oversight process is a risk-informed performance-based framework that uses PRA insights. Consequently, the NRC set up a significance determination process (SDP) that would rely on the risk significance of performance deficiencies of the licensees. The SDP assesses contributions from both internal events and external events using the best available information. Over the last two to three decades, the NRC has completed the development of high-quality PRA models that are capable of assessing risks due to internal events. Several recent regulatory actions, some of which were prompted by the events at Fukushima, have provided the impetus for the NRC and the licensees to enhance the methods and information related to assessing risks associated with external events such as earthquakes and floods. This paper describes the current status on how the NRC staff uses the best available information to assess risk associated with external events and notes a plethora of regulatory actions that may provide inertia for the development of high-quality models for external events. The paper then points to past trends on how the regulatory actions in the fire PRA area contributed to significant advancements in fire PRA technology and points to tangible evidence on how the same trend has begun in the area of seismic- and flood-related risk assessments.