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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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!
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Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
Ibrahim Jarrah, Rizwan uddin (Univ of Illinois)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 503-512
The spent fuel dry cask should remain subcritical under normal, abnormal, and accident conditions. The cask becomes susceptible to criticality if it is misloaded with assemblies that do not conform with the Certificate of Compliance (CoC). To avoid this scenario, the cask loading process involves several verification steps to make sure that all of the loaded assemblies satisfy the CoC requirements. However, most of loading and verification steps are carried out by humans with finite probabilities for errors, which need to be quantified. In this paper, the probability of misloading a cask with light water reactor (PWR and BWR) fuel is quantified using the event tree method. Probability distribution functions for all of the human errors are obtained using the SPAR-H human reliability analysis method. The Fussell-Vesely (FV) importance measure is performed to determine the tasks that contribute the most to the having a misloaded cask. The probability of misload is found to be 5.56E-06 for cask loaded with the PWR and 2.95E-05 for the cask loaded with the BWR fuel. Both of these are considered to be small.