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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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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Latest News
Senate EPW Committee to hold Nieh nomination hearing
Nieh
The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will hold a nomination hearing Wednesday for Ho Nieh, President Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as commission at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Trump nominated Nieh on July 30 to serve as NRC commissioner the remainder of a term that will expire June 30, 2029, as Nuclear NewsWire previously reported.
Nieh has been vice president of regulatory affairs at Southern Nuclear since 2021, though since June 2024 he has been at the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations as a loaned executive.
A return to the NRC: If confirmed by the Senate, Nieh would be returning to the NRC after three previous stints totaling nearly 20 years.
Zeyun Wu, Christian Pochron, Mihai (Mike) G. M. Pop, Neal Mann
Nuclear Technology | Volume 211 | Number 2 | February 2025 | Pages 225-240
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2024.2323267
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Molten Uranium Breeder Reactor (MUBR) is a radically new reactor concept with a mixed-energy spectrum. MUBR is fueled with molten uranium metal in large-diameter fuel tubes and is cooled by circulating molten uranium fuel through a heat exchanger. The reactor has heavy water as moderator, and the reactivity of the reactor is primarily controlled by the voiding effect of the moderator through an innovative control cavity structure design. Because the MUBR design is vastly different from most existing fission reactors, neutronics analysis must be performed for many different combinations of design parameters to identify viable and optimum design configurations. To facilitate the neutronics analysis, a proprietary program called MUBR6gen is being developed to provide a pipeline tool to expedite the process. MUBR6gen employs two well-established neutronics codes, i.e., MCNP and SCALE, to perform standard neutronics calculations for MUBR by automating input preparation and output processing. In addition, MUBR6gen ensures consistency of the MCNP and SCALE inputs and compares the outputs of the two codes to warrant the simulation results. Augmented with MUBR6gen, standard neutronics analysis was carried out on a small-scale MUBR design, which serves as a model problem in the paper. The neutronics performance characteristics of the model reactor were obtained and discussed in a code-to-code pattern. An overall very good agreement between the results of the two neutronics codes was established. Based on the success of the model problem analysis, further neutronics analysis using MUBR6gen was extended for a set of MUBR variant designs. Meaningful and promising fuel cycle analysis results for the 10 different designs were achieved and discussed. These results are used to identify the best MUBR candidates in terms of fuel lifetime and utilization efficiency for future applications.