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Division Spotlight
Decommissioning & Environmental Sciences
The mission of the Decommissioning and Environmental Sciences (DES) Division is to promote the development and use of those skills and technologies associated with the use of nuclear energy and the optimal management and stewardship of the environment, sustainable development, decommissioning, remediation, reutilization, and long-term surveillance and maintenance of nuclear-related installations, and sites. The target audience for this effort is the membership of the Division, the Society, and the public at large.
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!
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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.
Challenge: Accelerate development and qualification of advanced materials.
How: Use science-based design to reduce the development and qualification timeline for new nuclear fuels and advanced materials that can withstand extreme fission, fusion, and space power and propulsion environments.
Background: Advanced fission and fusion reactor designs offer many potential benefits, but will require new materials to be optimized. These advanced reactors have unique challenges that call for materials to resist corrosion when in prolonged contact with liquid salts or liquid metals, remain strong at elevated temperatures in a neutron field, maintain structural integrity when exposed to high fluxes of light ions and high heat flux, resist reaction in a loss of coolant event, and more.
Materials must be developed and qualified for each of these areas so that they can be implemented in new reactors. Materials issues lie at the heart of many of the technology issues that need to be solved. Without advanced materials, adequately qualified so that they can be used in engineering designs, we will never have a viable fusion or advanced fission power plant. This is a multi-faceted challenge that benefits not only nuclear energy research, but has applications for many other industries.
The current development and qualification timeline is long, especially due to limited experimental facilities and capabilities for in-reactor material irradiation testing. Significant scientific advances over the past few decades have enabled us to improve our understanding of irradiation effects on materials, including predictive capabilities. As such, we believe we can utilize these advancements to accelerate the materials qualification timeline, effectively reducing that barrier against deployment of future reactor technologies. Realizing this goal will include smart use of advanced modeling approaches, the establishment of experimental facilities and data generation for validation analysis (especially for advanced reactors), and reconsideration or modification of existing requirements for in-reactor material irradiation testing.
Additionally, decades of ion beam irradiation have proven it to be an extremely useful tool to enhance the understanding of radiation damage in materials for nuclear applications. Inducing radiation damage utilizing ion beams in structural materials and fuels causes high displacement damage rates and therefore accelerates the research on the materials response under these conditions.
Last modified May 12, 2017, 1:23am CDT