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
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
May 2024
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
College students help develop waste-measuring device at Hanford
A partnership between Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) and Washington State University has resulted in the development of a device to measure radioactive and chemical tank waste at the Hanford Site. WRPS is the contractor at Hanford for the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management.
B. Badamchi, N. Kandadai, A. A. Simon, M. Mitkova, H. Subbaraman (Boise State Univ)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 1037-1042
Materials inside nuclear reactors are exposed to extreme conditions, which include high temperature, high radiation doses, and corrosive conditions. Precise monitoring of a reactor environment is critical for its stability and proper functionality over the operational lifetime. To observe material performance (microstructure, chemistry, mechanical and other property changes with the changing conditions) while exposed to the reactor environment, real time monitoring of environmental conditions is required. This paper showcases the design of a novel, highly accurate, small size, reusable, real-time and reversible high temperature sensor for use within a nuclear reactor. The design is based on a hybrid plasmonic waveguide (HPW) structure comprising of chalcogenide glass (ChG) cladding on high index silicon optical waveguides. The transmitted power through the HPW structure in the transverse electric (TE) and transverse magnetic (TM) modes are simulated for both the amorphous and the crystalline states of the ChG phase change material. Our devices demonstrate a high extinction ratio of 120.4dB within a short length of 5 ?m of the waveguide, indicating the compactness of our designs. Moreover, monitoring the output power from an array of HPWs, wherein each silicon waveguide is coated with a different composition of ChG glass, provides a convenient way to monitor the temperature increase inside a nuclear reactor as a function of time.