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Division Spotlight
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
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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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
First astatine-labeled compound shipped in the U.S.
The Department of Energy’s National Isotope Development Center (NIDC) on March 31 announced the successful long-distance shipment in the United States of a biologically active compound labeled with the medical radioisotope astatine-211 (At-211). Because previous shipments have included only the “bare” isotope, the NIDC has described the development as “unleashing medical innovation.”
P. Rodriguez-Fernandez, A. E. White, A. J. Creely, M. J. Greenwald, N. T. Howard, F. Sciortino, J. C. Wright
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 74 | Number 1 | July-August 2018 | Pages 65-76
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1396166
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Understanding transport in magnetically confined plasmas is critical for developing predictive models for future devices such as ITER. Thanks to recent progress in simulation and theory, along with enhanced computational power and better diagnostic systems, direct and quantitative comparisons between experimental results and models is possible. However, validating transport models using additional constraints and accounting for experimental uncertainties still remains a formidable task. In this work, a new optimization framework is developed to address the issue of constrained validation of transport models. The Validation via Iterative Training of Active Learning Surrogates (VITALS) framework exploits surrogate-based strategies using Gaussian processes and sequential parameter updates to achieve the combination of plasma parameters that matches experimental transport measurements within diagnostic error bars. VITALS is successfully implemented to study L-mode plasmas in the Alcator C-Mod tokamak, and for the first time, additional measurable quantities, such as incremental diffusivity and fluctuation levels, are used during the validation process of the quasi-linear transport models TGLF-SAT1 and TGLF-SAT0. First results indicate that these machine-learning algorithms are very suitable and adaptable as a self-consistent, fast, and comprehensive validation methodology for plasma transport codes.