ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
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Division Spotlight
Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Winter Conference and Expo
November 17–21, 2024
Orlando, FL|Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld
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!
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Energy is everything
Lisa Marshallpresident@ans.org
Energy is the foundation of modern society. It enhances quality of life and drives industrialization. As we work toward fuller energy transition, policies are essential to organizing our march forward. Bipartisan legislation is doing just that, propelling our current and future actions.
The Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy (ADVANCE) Act will help propel the work of industry, academia, and several branches of government in exciting—and necessary—directions.
The Senate introduced the act in March 2023, and the House of Representatives passed the Fire Grants and Safety Act, which incorporated the ADVANCE Act, on May 9, 2024 (393–13). Then on June 18, the Senate passed the ADVANCE Act (88–2), and on July 9, President Biden signed the bill into law. New and revised approaches to process and deployment of nuclear energy capacity is well on its way. Below, I have highlighted a few title sections to show scope and significance.
S. Bourganel, O. Petit, C. M. Diop
Nuclear Technology | Volume 184 | Number 1 | October 2013 | Pages 29-41
Technical Paper | Neutron Transport and Shielding | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A19866
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Électricité de France nuclear park consists of 58 pressurized water nuclear reactors. To ensure their good performance and safety, ex-core neutron shielding studies are regularly performed. For example, neutron flux calculations in ex-core ionization chambers and pressure vessel neutron fluence studies are carried out. In the first case, ex-core ionization chambers are neutron detectors located in the reactor pit, around the reactor vessel. They are dedicated to reactor operation and core protection. In the second case, the calculation of the fast fluence (for energy >1 MeV) in the pressure vessel is used to determine its fracture toughness and integrity. To improve the fluence computations, new efficient parametric methods are under development. For these two problems, Monte Carlo transport codes such as TRIPOLI-4® allow us to perform simulations in realistic complex three-dimensional geometries and to produce reference results.The aim of the present paper is to present together the theoretical background of our approach based on the continuous-energy Green's functions computation and storage to perform both vessel neutron fluence and ex-core chamber responses. The normalized source contribution or importance factor formalism using Green's functions computation is also described, with its associated statistical uncertainty calculation. Application examples to realistic nuclear plant configurations are given.