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
Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
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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High-temperature plumbing and advanced reactors
The use of nuclear fission power and its role in impacting climate change is hotly debated. Fission advocates argue that short-term solutions would involve the rapid deployment of Gen III+ nuclear reactors, like Vogtle-3 and -4, while long-term climate change impact would rely on the creation and implementation of Gen IV reactors, “inherently safe” reactors that use passive laws of physics and chemistry rather than active controls such as valves and pumps to operate safely. While Gen IV reactors vary in many ways, one thing unites nearly all of them: the use of exotic, high-temperature coolants. These fluids, like molten salts and liquid metals, can enable reactor engineers to design much safer nuclear reactors—ultimately because the boiling point of each fluid is extremely high. Fluids that remain liquid over large temperature ranges can provide good heat transfer through many demanding conditions, all with minimal pressurization. Although the most apparent use for these fluids is advanced fission power, they have the potential to be applied to other power generation sources such as fusion, thermal storage, solar, or high-temperature process heat.1–3
Ahmad Al Rashdan, Vivek Agarwal
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 8 | August 2019 | Pages 1053-1061
Technical Paper – Special section on Big Data for Nuclear Power Plants | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1601469
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The migration of paper-based work packages to an electronic version for the nuclear power industry results in opportunities for work optimization through data analytics and integration. This can only be achieved if the work package is broken into its data elements and stored in a structured data form. The contribution of this paper is the development of a set of guidelines that enables creating a data model from breaking the work package into its data elements. The data model can be used to create a common information model for work packages at nuclear power plants. The results presented and discussed in this paper highlight distinctive data model characteristics regarding the work element properties and associations; work package topology; properties cascade; elements and properties function; templates and instances; and steps flow. In total, 13 guidelines were identified as part of this work. The resulting benefits from the extracted data model are enabling step-level review of the work, reducing planning effort, and automating work package creation and formatting. In addition, coupling work process data with other data sources at the plant improves overall maintenance activity efficiency by enabling capabilities such as real-time schedule update and automatic allocation and release of work resources.