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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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
Kai Yao, Shengyuan Yan, Cong Chi Tran
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 4 | April 2022 | Pages 761-774
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2021.1947123
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Human error is an important factor leading to nuclear power plant (NPP) accidents. The increasing of the amount of information improves the operators’ human error probability (HEP) in the digital main control room of NPPs. Human reliability analysis (HRA) is considered to be an effective method to reduce human error. The Cognitive Reliability and Error Analysis Method (CREAM) is one of the widely accepted HRA methods. However, there are shortcomings that weaken the applicability of this method. Therefore, this research proposes a fuzzy CREAM method based on a combination of fuzzy logic theory and the CREAM method. The study considers the weight of common performance conditions (CPCs) and constructs a logical relationship between CPCs and control modes. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is determined using a widely accepted method to validate the evaluation results. The validated results showed that the evaluation result has a consistency between the fuzzy CREAM method and the traditional CREAM method. They indicated that the fuzzy CREAM method can obtain reliable HEP.
