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
Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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
Mar 2024
Jan 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
April 2024
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
February 2024
Latest News
Can hydrogen be the transportation fuel in an otherwise nuclear economy?
Let’s face it: The global economy should be powered primarily by nuclear power. And it probably will by the end of this century, with a still-significant assist from renewables and hydro. Once nuclear systems are dominant, the costs come down to where gas is now; and when carbon emissions are reduced to a small portion of their present state, it will become obvious that most other sources are only good in niche settings. I mean, why use small modular reactors to load-follow when they can just produce that power instead of buffering it?
Florent Lemont, Mickael Marchand, Majdi Mabrouk, Doriana Milelli, Jean Marie Baronnet
Nuclear Technology | Volume 198 | Number 1 | April 2017 | Pages 53-63
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1289009
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The CEA is studying the development of processes with a sufficiently large operating range in order to propose a general treatment system and make it possible to absorb a significant quantity of radioactive liquid stocks awaiting treatment around the world. A solution may be the use of submerged plasma into which the organic liquids would be injected. Current research has demonstrated that such a technique may enable the instantaneous and complete destruction of liquids with a wide variety of constituents, such as chlorine, fluorine, or phosphorus. The ELIPSE process was designed based on the results of this research. In this process, an arc plasma torch is submerged in the core of an aqueous solution. The submersion solution offers many advantages: quenching and cleaning of combustion gases; filtering of the particles they contain; and cooling maintained for the entire process, which guarantees excellent corrosion control. An advantage of this type of design is that the gas treatment system can be reduced to a demister-condenser followed by a simple safety filter, thereby offering the additional advantage of an extremely compact treatment system. This design also allows the ELIPSE process to become by this way an embeddable process if required.
The present paper will first describe the state of the art concerning this concept and secondly research currently conducted using the ELIPSE process to destroy a wide variety of liquids such as tributylphosphate, trichloroethylene, and perfluoropolyether with an efficiency of over 99% at rates of several liters per hour. The apparent absence of any corrosion observed in the treatment system would indicate that, following optimization, a universal and compact process may soon be available, which may be transportable and dedicated to the treatment of orphan waste products awaiting treatment.