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
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
Jul 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
August 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
July 2025
Latest News
DOE on track to deliver high-burnup SNF to Idaho by 2027
The Department of Energy said it anticipated delivering a research cask of high-burnup spent nuclear fuel from Dominion Energy’s North Anna nuclear power plant in Virginia to Idaho National Laboratory by fall 2027. The planned shipment is part of the High Burnup Dry Storage Research Project being conducted by the DOE with the Electric Power Research Institute.
As preparations continue, the DOE said it is working closely with federal agencies as well as tribal and state governments along potential transportation routes to ensure safety, transparency, and readiness every step of the way.
Watch the DOE’s latest video outlining the project here.
Pedro Mena, R. A. Borrelli, Leslie Kerby
Nuclear Technology | Volume 210 | Number 1 | January 2024 | Pages 112-125
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2023.2214257
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Concerns over cybersecurity in critical systems have grown significantly over the last decade. The increase in the successful attacks against infrastructure, major corporations, and governments has led to major investment in mitigating and preventing cyberattacks. At the same time, there has been a significant interest in utilizing data in operations, with machine learning applications becoming a popular area of study. One industry exploring machine learning applications is the nuclear industry. Because of the sensitive nature of nuclear systems, the question if attacks on nuclear data can be detected has begun to take urgency. This study explores the use of autoencoders to detect anomalies in nuclear data that could be potentially used to evaluate the operating status of a nuclear system. Data from a generic pressurized water reactor simulator used in a previous study to diagnose transients was used to train an autoencoder model using Keras. A separate portion of these data was altered by adding statistical noise for validation. Four different levels of noise were used in this experiment. Once the autoencoder was trained, a threshold was calculated using the average mean square error of the predictions and the standard deviation from that loss. Points above the threshold were classified as anomalies while points below were considered unaltered. For the initial level of noise, the model was able to score near perfect in recall, capturing all but 13 of the 13 884 altered points. However, in terms of precision, the model misclassified a number of unaltered points as altered, resulting in a score of 73.76%. To test the sensitivity of the model, the amount of noise was reduced three times, and as expected, the performance of the model worsened with each reduction. Still, the high performance in identifying altered points for higher levels of noise is an encouraging first step in developing anomaly detection systems for nuclear data.