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
Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
Meeting Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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
Jun 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
August 2025
Nuclear Technology
July 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Take steps on SNF and HLW disposal
Matt Bowen
With a new administration and Congress, it is time once again to ponder what will happen—if anything—on U.S. spent nuclear fuel and high-level waste management policy over the next few years. One element of the forthcoming discussion seems clear: The executive and legislative branches are eager to talk about recycling commercial SNF. Whatever the merits of doing so, it does not obviate the need for one or more facilities for disposal of remaining long-lived radionuclides. For that reason, making progress on U.S. disposal capabilities remains urgent, lest the associated radionuclide inventories simply be left for future generations to deal with.
In March, Rick Perry, who was secretary of energy during President Trump’s first administration, observed that during his tenure at the Department of Energy it became clear to him that any plan to move SNF “required some practical consent of the receiving state and local community.”1
Shaoxuan Wang, Zhixian Lin, Ming Sun, Yuantao Yao, Jie Wu, Daochuan Ge
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 8 | August 2023 | Pages 1129-1144
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2023.2195357
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In complex nuclear energy redundancy systems, there are many failure events that do not follow specific time distribution. For these atypical time-distribution events, traditional dynamic fault tree (DFT) methods cannot be applied directly, which has posed great challenges to reliability modeling and evaluating. In this contribution, we summarize atypical time-distribution events in nuclear energy redundancy systems and propose new modeling and evaluating methods based on DFT. To demonstrate the reasonability of the proposed methods, two case studies about make-up water pumps and emergency diesel generators are analyzed in comparison with traditional DFT. The results indicate that the proposed methods can effectively model and analyze the reliability of redundant systems with atypical time-distribution events. The proposed methods can provide useful information for optimization design of nuclear energy redundancy systems and has potential to improve the economy of nuclear power plants by relaxing overestimated unreliability.
