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Division Spotlight
Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
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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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.
Dalin Zhang, Xue-Nong Chen, Fabrizio Gabrielli, Andrei Rineiski, Werner Maschek
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 61 | Number 1 | January 2012 | Pages 287-292
Modeling and Simulations | Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Emerging Nuclear Energy Systems | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A13434
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The concept of traveling wave reactor (TWR) applies the mechanism of self sustainable and propagation nuclear fission traveling waves in fertile media of 238U and 232Th to achieve very high fuel utilization. However, the long wave length of such fission traveling wave puts a limit on the applicability of the TWR concept. The axial fuel shuffling strategy is proposed based on the mechanism of asymptotic nuclear fission traveling wave, and is applied to a sodium-cooled fast reactor (SFR) loading metallic 238U fuel. The multi-group deterministic neutronic code ERANOS with JEFF3.1 data library is used as a basic tool to perform the neutronics and burn-up calculations. The calculations are firstly performed in a 1-D case for parametric understanding, and further extended to a 2-D R-Z case. The shuffling calculations for the 1-D and 2-D SFR model described in this paper brought about some interesting results. The results indicate that keff parabolically varies with the shuffling period, while the burn-up increases linearly. The highest burn-up achieved in 2-D case is 46at%. The power shape distortion in 2-D case is observed, and the power peaking factor is much higher than that in 1-D case, but it decreases with the shuffling period increasing.