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
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
ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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
Feb 2025
Jul 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
March 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
February 2025
Latest News
Colin Judge: Testing structural materials in Idaho’s newest hot cell facility
Idaho National Laboratory’s newest facility—the Sample Preparation Laboratory (SPL)—sits across the road from the Hot Fuel Examination Facility (HFEF), which started operating in 1975. SPL will host the first new hot cells at INL’s Materials and Fuels Complex (MFC) in 50 years, giving INL researchers and partners new flexibility to test the structural properties of irradiated materials fresh from the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) or from a partner’s facility.
Materials meant to withstand extreme conditions in fission or fusion power plants must be tested under similar conditions and pushed past their breaking points so performance and limitations can be understood and improved. Once irradiated, materials samples can be cut down to size in SPL and packaged for testing in other facilities at INL or other national laboratories, commercial labs, or universities. But they can also be subjected to extreme thermal or corrosive conditions and mechanical testing right in SPL, explains Colin Judge, who, as INL’s division director for nuclear materials performance, oversees SPL and other facilities at the MFC.
SPL won’t go “hot” until January 2026, but Judge spoke with NN staff writer Susan Gallier about its capabilities as his team was moving instruments into the new facility.
Workshop
Sunday, September 25, 2022|1:00–5:00PM PDT|Grand Pacific AB
ADVANTG is a software package that generates variance reduction parameters (space- and energy-dependent weight windows and biased source probabilities) that can substantially improve the convergence rate of fixed-source neutron and photon radiation transport simulations using MCNP. ADVANTG implements the Consistent Adjoint Driven Importance Sampling (CADIS) method to accelerate individual tallies and the Forward-Weighted CADIS (FW-CADIS) method to obtain nearly uniform statistical precision across multiple tallies and large mesh tallies. Additionally, ADVANTG 3.2.0 has the capability to produce variance reduction parameters based on the Multi Step CADIS (MS-CADIS) methodology for optimal calculations of delayed gamma radiation fields such as the shutdown dose rate (SDDR) in fusion facilities.
The workshop will discuss the theoretical background of the methods implemented in ADVANTG before moving on to a demonstration of the use of CADIS and FW-CADIS methods on test cases. The workshop will also include a tutorial on how to visualize the discretized geometry, source and discrete ordinates solutions using the open-source VisIt software (https://wci.llnl.gov/codes/visit/). Common issues when using variance reduction will be discussed alongside some best practices and suggestions for ADVANTG workflows.
ADVANTG has been used in a variety of radiation transport applications at ORNL as well as other organizations. Some recent advanced applications will be presented and discussed, including the use of ADVANTG for pressure vessel fluence predictions, neutron fluence and radiation heating in LWR concrete bioshields, and in the workflow for determining SDDR in the JET and ITER fusion facilities.
To join the conversation, you must be logged in and registered for the meeting.
Register NowLog In