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
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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
Apr 2024
Jan 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2024
Nuclear Technology
May 2024
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Commercial nuclear innovation "new space" age
In early 2006, a start-up company launched a small rocket from a tiny island in the Pacific. It exploded, showering the island with debris. A year later, a second launch attempt sent a rocket to space but failed to make orbit, burning up in the atmosphere. Another year brought a third attempt—and a third failure. The following month, in September 2008, the company used the last of its funds to launch a fourth rocket. It reached orbit, making history as the first privately funded liquid-fueled rocket to do so.
Xia Bing, Jiong Guo, Chunlin Wei, Ding She, Jian Zhang, Fu Li (Tsinghua Univ)
Proceedings | 16th International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management Conference (IHLRWM 2017) | Charlotte, NC, April 9-13, 2017 | Pages 848-852
The pebble bed high temperature reactors (PB-HTRs) are one of the promising reactor types for the next generation nuclear systems. Some intrinsic features of the PB-HTRs’ spherical fuel element embedded with the TRISO coated fuel particles bring high proliferation-resistance to the PB-HTR spent fuel storage, including the continuous on-line fueling strategy, the difficulty of processing TRISO particles, the low heavy metal density in the fuel pebbles and the high depletion of plutonium. The material accountancy concept and methodology of PB-HTR spent fuel storage are proposed in this work. For PB-HTRs, the spent fuel storage should be treated as an item facility; however, the items in PB-HTR spent fuel storage are the spent fuel containers, instead of the spent fuel assemblies in conventional PWR’s spent fuel storage. The accountancy of nuclear material should be implemented by evaluating the average burnup value of a batch of spent fuels. For the equilibrium core of PB-HTR, the average burnup value of a batch of spent fuel pebbles is determined by the integral power during the period when these pebbles are unloaded from the reactor core. Furthermore, the burnup value of each spent fuel pebble can also be measured by gamma spectroscopy upon the long-lived fission product 137Cs. After evaluating the spent fuel burnup, the dependency of the amounts of heavy metal nuclides upon the burnup value of a spent fuel pebble is estimated by the depletion calculations. It is revealed that the non-proliferation features of PB-HTR spent fuel storage is excellent and the accountancy methodology proposed in this work is feasible. Besides the high safety features, the high proliferation-resistance can be another attraction of the PB-HTRs.