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
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
Meeting Spotlight
2027 ANS Winter Conference and Expo
October 31–November 4, 2027
Washington, DC|The Westin Washington, DC 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!
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
Supreme Court rules against Texas in interim storage case
The Supreme Court voted 6–3 against Texas and a group of landowners today in a case involving the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s licensing of a consolidated interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel, reversing a decision by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to grant the state and landowners Fasken Land and Minerals (Fasken) standing to challenge the license.
Seong Gu Kim, Maolong Liu, Youho Lee (Univ of New Mexico), Jeong Ik Lee (KAIST)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 331-342
Fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature reactor (FHR) is one of the Gen IV nuclear systems. It utilizes small spherical type fuel with 30mm diameter, and the core is filled with numerous pebbles. The authors developed a simple code that generates randomly-packed spherical fuels inside the cylindrical core. The fluid domain was generated and converted to perform the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis to figure out the local heat transfer coefficient of pebble-bed fuels. To ensure promising CFD analysis model the authors examined sensitive parameters – the number of pebbles, grid size and gap size and turbulence models. Large-Eddy Simulation (LES) was performed for the selection of the turbulence model with face-centered cubic (FCC) single channel model. As a result, k-omega Shear Stress Transport (SST) with gamma transition model is selected as a turbulence model for randomly-packed pebble’s CFD analysis. The result shows that the pebble’s local heat transfer coefficient has a Gaussian distribution with average and standard deviation. Furthermore, the authors propose a new Nusselt number correlation for the randomly-packed pebble bed reactor with FLiBe coolant. The result leads to a conclusion that the thermal-hydraulic performance of fuel has a statistical distribution and it will have the effect on the robustness of fuel material and design criteria of safety systems.