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The objectives of MSTD are: promote the advancement of materials science in Nuclear Science Technology; support the multidisciplines which constitute it; encourage research by providing a forum for the presentation, exchange, and documentation of relevant information; promote the interaction and communication among its members; and recognize and reward its members for significant contributions to the field of materials science in nuclear technology.
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2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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ANS announces 2025 Presidential Citations
One of the privileges of being president of the American Nuclear Society is awarding Presidential Citations to individuals who have demonstrated outstanding effort in some manner for the benefit of ANS or the nuclear community at large. Citations are conferred twice each year, at the Annual and Winter Meetings.
ANS President Lisa Marshall has named this season’s recipients, who will receive recognition at the upcoming Annual Conference in Chicago during the Special Session on Tuesday, June 17.
A. Epiney, S. Canepa, O. Zerkak, H. Ferroukhi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 196 | Number 2 | November 2016 | Pages 223-237
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NT16-47
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The STARS project at the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI) has adopted the TRACE thermal-hydraulic code. For analyses involving interactions between system and core, a coupling of TRACE with the SIMULATE-3K (S3K) light water reactor (LWR) core simulator has been developed. In this configuration, the codes and associated simulation models play a central role to achieve a comprehensive safety analysis capability. Therefore, efforts have now been undertaken to consolidate the validation strategy by implementing a more rigorous and structured assessment approach for TRACE applications. The principle is to systematically track the evolution of a given set of predicted physical quantities of interest (QoIs) over a multidimensional parametric space. If properly set up, such environment should provide code developers and code users with persistent (less affected by user effect) and quantified information (sensitivity of QoIs) on the applicability of a simulation scheme (codes, methodology, and input models) for steady-state and transient analysis of full LWR systems. Through this, for each given transient/accident, critical paths of the validation process can be identified that could then translate into defining reference schemes to be applied for downstream predictive simulations. To illustrate this approach, this validation strategy is applied to an inadvertent blowdown event that occurred in a Swiss BWR/6. The transient was initiated by the spurious actuation of the automatic depressurization system. Here, the validation approach progresses through a number of dimensions: (a) different versions of the TRACE code; (b) the methodology dimension—in this case imposed power and updated TRACE core models are investigated; and (c) the nodalization dimension, where changes to the input model are assessed. For each step in each validation dimension, a common set of QoIs is investigated. For the steady-state results, these include fuel temperature distributions. For the transient part of the present study, the evaluated QoIs include the system pressure evolution and water carryover into the steam line. It has been seen that the improvements to the model predictions resulted in a small impact on the system pressure gradient, thus confirming a persistency of the downstream mechanical stress estimate, whereas the water carryover could vary by up to 150% as a function of the adopted simulation methodology.