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
Isotopes & Radiation
Members are devoted to applying nuclear science and engineering technologies involving isotopes, radiation applications, and associated equipment in scientific research, development, and industrial processes. Their interests lie primarily in education, industrial uses, biology, medicine, and health physics. Division committees include Analytical Applications of Isotopes and Radiation, Biology and Medicine, Radiation Applications, Radiation Sources and Detection, and Thermal Power Sources.
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.
Michael Thompson (Univ of Tennessee, Knoxville), Benjamin Jordan (Centrus Energy), Jamie Coble (Univ of Tennessee, Knoxville)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 1267-1274
Greater situational awareness of plant conditions is necessary to move the current fleet of nuclear power facilities away from costly periodic maintenance activities. Sensed data provide the indicators of plant and equipment condition; however, these instrumentation and transmitters are themselves subject to aging and degradation over time. Online monitoring methods have long been proposed to assess the calibration status of sensors based on the data collected during normal plant operation. Auto-associative kernel regression models (AAKR) are commonly applied to predict the “expected” sensor value, and statistical hypothesis tests or thresholding algorithms are used to determine if the measured value agrees with the expectation. AAKR models work well for stationary operation of systems, but these models may not be as well suited for systems that undergo normal operational transients, as we expect to see in small modular reactors, advanced reactors, and many fuel cycle facilities. This paper presents an alternative approach to detection and diagnostics of sensor degradation and anomalies based on generalized singular value decomposition (GSVD) in computational linear algebra. The proposed method is demonstrated on experimental data collected on a two loop forced-flow water loop, but the approach is expected to be more generally applicable to a variety of nuclear facilities and to equipment and components beyond sensor suites.