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
Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
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Nuclear Technology
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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Norway’s Halden reactor takes first step toward decommissioning
The government of Norway has granted the transfer of the Halden research reactor from the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) to the state agency Norwegian Nuclear Decommissioning (NND). The 25-MWt Halden boiling water reactor operated from 1958 to 2018 and was used in the research of nuclear fuel, reactor internals, plant procedures and monitoring, and human factors.
Michal Cihlář, Slavomír Entler, Tomáš Czakoj, Václav Dostál, Jan Prehradný, Pavel Zácha
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 79 | Number 2 | February 2023 | Pages 104-116
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2022.2120301
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Current tritium production might not be enough for all future fusion research reactors. Different approaches for tritium production have been studied in the past, one of which was tritium production using the accelerator-driven subcritical systems. This idea was dismissed in the 1990s as uneconomical when compared to using existing commercial light water reactors. This paper presents changes to the basic idea, mainly the use of a molten spallation target and molten lithium breeding volume. This advanced design is described, optimized for tritium yield using the MCNP 6.2.0 code, and compared between different accelerators.
The optimized configuration consists of a 1-GeV, 200-mA proton accelerator, a molten Pb-Bi eutectic spallation target with a length of 60 cm and a diameter of 75 cm, and molten lithium breeding volume with dimensions of 500 cm in length and 900 cm in diameter. As calculated, the annual production of the proposed accelerator-driven tritium production system could be as high as 350 g of tritium with the optimized configuration.
