ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
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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
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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June 2025
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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.
W. J. Walsh and George Burnet
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 25 | Number 3 | July 1966 | Pages 227-235
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE66-A17829
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To learn more about liquid metal distillation as it might be applied to nuclear fuel recovery and reprocessing, liquid metal distillations involving the tin-zinc, cadmium-bismuth, and indium-zinc binary systems were conducted in an evacuated chamber. An x-ray fluorescence spectrometer provided a continuous chemical analysis of the distilling surface during each run. This information was used to evaluate the validity of various theories and assumptions concerning surface depletion, oxide contamination, and turbulence effects. The existence of a large surface depletion effect in nonturbulent metal distillations was proven. However, the level of turbulence necessary to eliminate concentration gradients was found to be much lower than that assumed by some designers of commercial equipment. The presence of surface oxides was often an important factor in determining the enrichment and rate of distillation. The Langmuir-Knudsen theory was shown to be unreliable when liquid diffusion or surface oxide resistances were significant. A more complete approach involving the principles of transport phenomena was developed. An analytical solution was derived for the nonturbulent case and was tested using the spectrometer data.