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.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
Feb 2026
Jul 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
March 2026
Nuclear Technology
February 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
January 2026
Latest News
From SPARC to ARC: CFS prepares for a first-of-a-kind fusion plant
Commonwealth Fusion Systems makes no small plans. The company wants to build a 400-MWe magnetic confinement fusion power plant called ARC near Richmond, Va., and begin operating it in the early 2030s. And the plans don’t end there. CFS wants to deploy “thousands” of fusion power plants capable of accelerating a global energy transition.
Cody J. Permann, Andrea M. Jokisaari, Michael R. Tonks, Daniel Schwen, Derek R. Gaston, Fande Kong, Robert Hiromoto, Richard C. Martineau
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 7 | July 2021 | Pages 885-904
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1843893
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The ability to identify features within finite element simulations and track them over time is necessary for understanding and quantifying complex behaviors as disparate as turbulent vortices in a flow field to microstructure evolution. We extend our previous research on feature identification in parallel unstructured meshes with the novel ability to maintain feature distinctness by dynamically remapping individual features to new simulation variables as the simulation evolves. We utilize this capability to drastically reduce the number of variables required in a simulation while maintaining the same fidelity as simulations without these reductions. We present this novel remapping algorithm and the corresponding implementation within the open-source Multiphysics Object Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE) framework. We demonstrate the utility of the method with a novel phase-field model of irradiation-driven grain subdivision in UO2. Grain population statistics are tracked over time, and a dynamically stable population of grains with a reduced size evolves. These results indicate that the small grain sizes observed in high-burnup UO2 can be explained by this mechanism.