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
Mathematics & Computation
Division members promote the advancement of mathematical and computational methods for solving problems arising in all disciplines encompassed by the Society. They place particular emphasis on numerical techniques for efficient computer applications to aid in the dissemination, integration, and proper use of computer codes, including preparation of computational benchmark and development of standards for computing practices, and to encourage the development on new computer codes and broaden their use.
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
May 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
July 2025
Nuclear Technology
June 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
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
A. Labarile, C. Mesado, R. Miró, G. Verdú
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 12 | December 2019 | Pages 1675-1684
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1631051
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the challenges of studying the neutronics of reactors is to generate reliable parameterized libraries that contain information to simulate the core in all possible operational and transient conditions. These libraries must include tables of cross sections and other neutronic and kinetic parameters and are obtained by simulating all the segments in a transport code. At the lattice level, one can use branch calculations to change “instantaneously” the feedback parameters as a function of burnup. When using random sampling for the lattice calculations, one can obtain statistical information about the output parameters and use it in a core simulation to characterize the accuracy of data estimating uncertainties when simulating a heterogeneous system at different scales of detail.
This work presents the methodology to generate NEMTAB libraries from data obtained in the SCALE code system to be used in PARCS simulations. The code TXT2NTAB is used to reorder the cross-section tables in NEMTAB format and generate another NEMTAB of standard deviation. With these libraries, the authors perform a steady-state calculation for a light water reactor to propagate several uncertainties at the core level. The methodology allows obtaining statistical information of the most important output parameters: multiplication factor keff, axial power peak Pz, and axial peak node Nz.