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
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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!
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Latest News
Norway’s Halden reactor takes first step toward decommissioning
The government of Norway has granted the transfer of the Halden research reactor from the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) to the state agency Norwegian Nuclear Decommissioning (NND). The 25-MWt Halden boiling water reactor operated from 1958 to 2018 and was used in the research of nuclear fuel, reactor internals, plant procedures and monitoring, and human factors.
Friday, May 20, 2022|8:00AM–5:30PM EDT
Ellwood
Although mainly distributed as a CFD toolbox, OpenFOAM is structured as a general open-source library for the discretization and parallel solution of partial differential equations on unstructured meshes. This combines with a high-level object-oriented API and with an intuitive finite-volume discretization method to allow for a streamlined development of advanced multi-physics solvers for various applications and by authors with various backgrounds. This is resulting in a rapidly growing community of users and developers, with a number of official and community-driven solvers that can nowadays help complement legacy nuclear codes with a wide geometric flexibility, HPC scalability, quick code tailoring, streamlined coupling possibilities, and a full transparency for improved E&T approaches.
The workshop will first present an overview of the multi-physics capabilities of OpenFOAM; listing its main features as a numerical library; highlighting some important achievements and milestones from various authors; singling out currently available solvers for nuclear applications; and discussing the lessons learned from a decade of development efforts. The objective will be to provide the audience with up-to-date information about the modelling possibilities provided by OpenFOAM and to summarize its strengths and challenges, thus allowing for more informed decisions about the opportunity to employ OpenFOAM, or existing OpenFOAM-based tools, for one's own applications.
The workshop will then provide a practical introduction to two open-source tools based on OpenFOAM, namely: the GeN-Foam code for the multiphysics analysis of nuclear reactors; and the OFFBEAT code for the 1.5-D, 2-D and 3-D simulation of fuel behaviour. Topics covered will include learning best practices, available resources, setting up a model, running, post-processing, basics of code tailoring. The objective will be to provide all necessary information for autonomous learning and use of these tools.
The workshop will be conducted as a mix of presentations, open discussions and practical examples. Participants are encouraged to test the practical examples on their own laptops. To that purpose, participants will need to have OpenFOAM 9 already installed (including paraFoam or paraview). Installation instructions are available at https://openfoam.org/download/
