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Oak Ridge focuses neutron scattering studies on TRISO fuels
Oak Ridge National Laboratory is reporting a development in TRISO fuel research that could help evaluate high-temperature gas reactor fuels. ORNL researchers used the Spallation Neutrons and Pressure Diffractometer at the lab’s Spallation Neutron Source to make neutron scattering measurements on TRISO fuel particles containing high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU).
A. Heifetz, D. Shribak, X. Huang, B. Wang, J. Saniie, R. Ponciroli, E. R. Koehl, S. Bakhtiari, R. B. Vilim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 4 | April 2021 | Pages 604-616
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1782626
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Transmission of information using elastic ultrasonic waves on existing metallic pipes provides an alternative communication option for a nuclear facility. The advantages of this approach consist of transmitting information through barriers, such as the containment building wall, with minimal modification of the existing hardware. Because bit rates on the order of kilobits per second are achievable, relatively large volumes of data, such as images, can be transmitted. A viable candidate for an ultrasonic communication channel is a stainless steel pipe of the chemical volume control system (CVCS) that penetrates through the reactor containment building wall through a sealed tunnel. To study ultrasonic communication under simulated nuclear facility conditions of high temperature, a test article was developed by installing heating tapes, temperature controllers, and thermal insulation on a laboratory CVCS-like stainless steel pipe. High temperature and radiation-resilient lithium niobate ultrasonic transducers were utilized for information transmission on the heated pipe. The amplitude shift keying (ASK) digital communication protocol was developed and implemented in a GNU Radio software–defined radio environment. A root-raised-cosine filter was introduced to suppress ultrasonic transducer ringing and thus reduce inter-symbol interference. This resulted in the enhancement of the data transmission bit rate compared to information encoding with square pulses. Demonstrations of communication at high temperature included transmission of a 90-KB image at the bit rate of 10 Kbps with a bit error rate of 10−3 across a 6-ft-long straight pipe heated up to 230°C. Additional preliminary studies were conducted to evaluate ultrasonic communication system resilience to environmental degradation and damage.