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
Jefferson Lab awarded $8M for accelerator technology to enable transmutation
The Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility is leading research supported by two Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) grants aimed at developing accelerator technology to enable nuclear waste recycling, decreasing the half-life of spent nuclear fuel.
Both grants, totaling $8.17 million in combined funding, were awarded through the Nuclear Energy Waste Transmutation Optimized Now (NEWTON) program, which aims to enable the transmutation of nuclear fuels by funding novel technologies for improving the performance of particle generation systems.
Victor C. Leite, Elia Merzari, Roberto Ponciroli, Lander Ibarra
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 5 | May 2023 | Pages 645-666
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2151822
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this study, the capabilities of a physics-informed convolutional neural network (CNN) for reconstructing the temperature field from a limited set of measurements taken at the boundaries of internal flows are demonstrated. Such an approach enables the development of less invasive monitoring methods for real-time plant diagnostics. As a test case, a Molten Salt Fast Reactor (MSFR) design was selected. This circulating fuel reactor has received interest from both scientific and industrial communities due to its intrinsic safety and sustainability. Molten salt flows in such reactors, however, can present highly localized temperature peaks that can induce significant thermal stresses onto the vessel walls. At these local maxima, the salt temperature may exceed a thousand kelvins, which makes a direct measurement challenging or even unfeasible. The proposed CNN algorithm allows one to detect indirectly such discontinuities through an accurate, albeit indirect, temperature measurement method during reactor operation. The datasets employed to train and test the machine learning models in the present work were generated with Nek5000, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code developed at Argonne National Laboratory. The CNN algorithm is trained with CFD results that span a set of MSFR operational power and flow ranges. To demonstrate the efficacy of the algorithm, predictions are made for test cases contained within the training range but for which the CFD data were not used when training. Results demonstrate that the proposed technique properly characterizes temperature peaks and distributions within the domain for a broad range of scenarios.