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
Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy
The mission of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy Division (NNPD) is to promote the peaceful use of nuclear technology while simultaneously preventing the diversion and misuse of nuclear material and technology through appropriate safeguards and security, and promotion of nuclear nonproliferation policies. To achieve this mission, the objectives of the NNPD are to: Promote policy that discourages the proliferation of nuclear technology and material to inappropriate entities. Provide information to ANS members, the technical community at large, opinion leaders, and decision makers to improve their understanding of nuclear nonproliferation issues. Become a recognized technical resource on nuclear nonproliferation, safeguards, and security issues. Serve as the integration and coordination body for nuclear nonproliferation activities for the ANS. Work cooperatively with other ANS divisions to achieve these objective nonproliferation policies.
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.
E. S. Hotston
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 26 | Number 3 | November 1994 | Pages 203-221
Technical Paper | Divertor System | doi.org/10.13182/FST94-A30323
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The exhaust modeling program for a fusion reactor based on a tokamak carried out for Next European Torus (NET)/International Tokamak Reactor (INTOR)/International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in the years 1982 to 1991 during which the author was involved is open to criticism on at least two counts. The first is that although in general there are at least two plasma configurations in the divertor that balance the upstream plasma pressure and power flow into the divertor, only one solution was accepted. The other solutions were assumed to be nonexistent or unimportant. The second count is that the possibility was not considered that atoms backscattered from the plasma could deposit power in the divertor target; inclusion of this process would have enlarged the domain in which multiple solutions are important. In particular, a plasma in which the temperatures are low appears as a possible solution. Here the atomic and molecular properties of the fuel, which vary quite rapidly with the electron temperature, are very important, so obtaining this solution by an implicit procedure is difficult. The two-dimensional modeling programs referred to earlier were carried out with the use of the Braams plasma transport code, which relies on a “strongly implicit method” for its updating. Examination of this code shows that the techniques used to stabilize it are incompatible with the procedures required to find the low-temperature solution. These objections would remain in the case where a Monte Carlo code is used to trace the fate of the neutrals recycled in the divertor. Recent modeling work based on Monte Carlo codes suggests that the plasma temperatures of the higher temperature solutions are likely to be greater than previously thought. Thus, resolution of the problem of finding the lower temperature solutions becomes important.