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
Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
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
Geological work begins on Poland’s first nuclear plant
Project management firm Bechtel started site geological surveys for Poland’s first nuclear power plant project, the company announced on Wednesday.
Bechtel will conduct in-depth geological surveys at the Lubiatowo-Kopalino site in the Pomeranian municipality of Choczewo, in northern Poland. This is a key milestone for the country’s entry into nuclear power production, as the surveys will inform the suitability of the planned site.
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.