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
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
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
Apr 2024
Jan 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
May 2024
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
X-energy receives federal tax credit for TRISO fuel facility
Advanced reactor company X-energy has been awarded $148.5 million in tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act for construction of its TRISO-X fuel fabrication facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
Allan K. Järvine, Alan G. Murchison, Peter G. Keech, Mahesh D. Pandey
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 7 | July 2020 | Pages 1036-1058
Regular Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1700730
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Lifetime predictions of used nuclear fuel containers (UFCs) destined for permanent storage in deep geological repositories are challenged by the uncertainty surrounding the environment and resultant performance of both the containers and the balance of engineered barriers over repository timescales. Much of the work to characterize the response of engineered barriers to postulated evolving environmental conditions and degradation mechanisms is limited to very short-term laboratory tests or at best in situ large-scale experiments spanning less than a few decades. While much is learned from these test programs, the fact remains that long-term performance of many tens of thousands of UFCs across a timescale of 100 000 years or more cannot be estimated with a significant degree of confidence by extrapolating single-point results of short-term experiments. This is particularly true when there is a desire to understand the progression of container failures and the timing of contaminants subsequently released into the geosphere. Lifetime predictions for UFCs require a probabilistic approach to address uncertainty. In the present work, a recently developed probabilistic corrosion model to estimate the life expectancy of copper-coated UFCs destined for a Canadian geological repository is expanded by modeling the impact of latent copper-coating defects and repository temperature on the key container life-limiting mechanism: sulfide-induced corrosion.