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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
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!
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Nuclear Science and Engineering
August 2025
Nuclear Technology
July 2025
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Latest News
Nuclear fuel cycle reimagined: Powering the next frontiers from nuclear waste
In the fall of 2023, a small Zeno Power team accomplished a major feat: they demonstrated the first strontium-90 heat source in decades—and the first-ever by a commercial company.
Zeno Power worked with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to fabricate and validate this Z1 heat source design at the lab’s Radiochemical Processing Laboratory. The Z1 demonstration heralded renewed interest in developing radioisotope power system (RPS) technology. In early 2025, the heat source was disassembled, and the Sr-90 was returned to the U.S. Department of Energy for continued use.
D. Mandelli, C. Smith, T. Riley, J. Nielsen, A. Alfonsi, J. Cogliati, C. Rabiti, J. Schroeder
Nuclear Technology | Volume 193 | Number 1 | January 2016 | Pages 161-174
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the RELAP5-3D Computer Code | doi.org/10.13182/NT14-142
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The existing fleet of nuclear power plants is in the process of having its lifetime extended and having the power generated from these plants increased via power uprates and improved operations. In order to evaluate the impact of these factors on the safety of the plant, the Risk-Informed Safety Margin Characterization (RISMC) pathway aims to provide insights to decision makers through a series of simulations of the plant dynamics for different initial conditions and accident scenarios. This paper presents a case study in order to show the capabilities of the RISMC methodology to assess the impact of power uprate of a boiling water reactor system during a station blackout accident scenario. We employ a system simulator code, RELAP5-3D, coupled with RAVEN, which performs the stochastic analysis. Our analysis is performed by (a) sampling values from a set of parameters from the uncertainty space of interest, (b) simulating the system behavior for that specific set of parameter values, and (c) analyzing the outcomes from the set of simulation runs.