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
Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
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.
Jeongtae Cho, Gyunyoung Heo, Young-Seok Lee, Hyuk-Jong Kim
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 69-74
doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12407
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Korean fusion technology roadmap specifies the construction of a fusion power plant at demonstrative scale by 2030. Obviously, the safety requirements for demonstration fusion reactors will be quite different and more stringent than that of experimental reactors. Nevertheless, the regulatory framework for such reactors was not fully matured due to the limited resources and the lack of technical feasibility in Korea. Sharing with the motivation, this research investigated and compared the safety characteristics of fission and fusion power plants to facilitate designing of engineered safety features. Korea has gained a vast experience over the last 30 years, regarding design, construction and operation of both pressurized light and heavy water reactors, which is useful to address the attributes for fission power plants. In case of fusion reactor technology, the operational experiences with ITER and K-STAR can be referred, considering their demonstration scale. Comparative study was performed in top-down manner. We compared the top requirements such as safety principles and defense-in-depth for fusion and fission power plants. The inherent safety parameters such as the reactivity feedback coefficients of fission power plants were investigated how these parameters would be represented in fusion power plants. The limits for operating conditions for a fusion reactor were investigated to recognize important parameters which would contribute to nuclear safety or, more specifically accident prevention. For the accidents beyond the operation limits, the need of engineering safety features was found indispensable for accident mitigation. However, it is anticipated that the engineering safety features for fusion reactors will be reduced in number, size, type, and safety-margin because the total amount of hazardous material is much lower as compared to fission reactors. Finally we proposed the table of contents of safety analysis report for fusion power plants borrowing the basic structure from the safety reports on fission reactors. The outcome of this study helps to prioritize research projects to be devoted for analyzing the safety of demonstration fusion plant, and to develop design and regulatory framework in South Korea.
