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
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
May 2025
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.
C. Sexton, T. Toll, B. McConkey, G, Harmon (AMS)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 1232-1241
Electrical cables provide essential functions such as delivery of power or instrumentation signals for most industrial monitoring systems. Most cables installed in plants use organic polymer insulation materials that can become brittle, crack, or degrade over time from exposure to harsh environmental conditions such as elevated temperature, moisture, vibration, mechanical shock and radiation. The focus of this paper describes an overall strategy for condition monitoring (CM) of electrical cables using both in-situ and laboratory assessment techniques. This cable CM strategy includes several steps to assess the health and manage the aging of the cables during the operating life of an industrial facility. These steps include performing As-Found evaluations to determine the current condition of installed cables. After the completion of the initial assessments, in-situ cable evaluations and testing are conducted to identify potential issues in the circuits including degraded terminations, splices and/or connections as well as identify degraded sections of cable insulation. This testing is accomplished with non-destructive evaluation (NDE) CM techniques that can be applied in-situ without adversely affecting the cable circuit or the end device. The As-Found and in-situ evaluations provide information about the current condition of the cable circuits as well as data used for trending age related degradation and estimating the remaining useful life (RUL) of the cables with regard to the environmental conditions they are exposed to during normal operation.