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.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
Latest Magazine Issues
Jul 2026
Jan 2026
2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
August 2026
Nuclear Technology
July 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
The deadline arrives: Checking in on the Reactor Pilot Program
On May 23, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14301, “Reforming Nuclear Reactor Testing at the DOE,” which instructed the Department of Energy to create a Reactor Pilot Program (RPP)—a new system in which companies could pursue DOE authorization to build and test their first-of-a-kind nuclear technologies. EO 14301 set an ambitious goal for that program: three reactors achieving criticality by July 4, 2026.
Fei Gao, Ram Devanathan, William J. Weber
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 39 | Number 2 | March 2001 | Pages 574-578
Fusion Materials | doi.org/10.13182/FST01-A11963298
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The primary damage by displacement cascades in 3C-SiC at 300 K has been studied by molecular dynamics (MD). A large number of cascades, with energies from 0.2 to 50 keV, have been simulated in order to investigate the effects of energy in defect production and clustering. The surviving defects are dominated by C interstitials and vacancies. The number of Frenkel pairs increases with increasing cascade energy, but the efficiency of their production declines with increasing energy in a similar fashion to that found in metals. Although the number of antisite defects is smaller than that of Frenkel pairs, their production also increases with increasing cascade energy. Most surviving defects are single interstitials and vacancies, and the tendency of interstitials to form clusters is very week. The size of the interstitial clusters is very small, which shows significantly different behavior than obtained by MD simulations in metals. The current results provide the statistics of the primary damage states in SiC as a function of primary knock-on energy, which are important in upscaling these results to model behavior over longer time and length scales.