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
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 8–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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
Oct 2025
Jul 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
December 2025
Nuclear Technology
November 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
DNFSB’s Summers ends board tenure, extending agency’s loss of quorum
Lee
Summers
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, the independent agency responsible for ensuring that Department of Energy facilities are protective of public health and safety, announced that the board’s acting chairman, Thomas Summers, has concluded his service with the agency, having completed his second term as a board member on October 18.
Summers’ departure leaves Patricia Lee, who joined the DNFSB after being confirmed by the Senate in July 2024, as the board’s only remaining member and acting chair. Lee’s DNFSB board term ends in October 2027.
S. A. Hasnain, D. Okrent
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 9 | Number 3 | March 1961 | Pages 314-322
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE61-A25882
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The performance of some blanket designs is studied using economically optimized cycling based on a simple economics model. For an 800-liter core fast reactor having a 45-cm radial blanket and an average core power of 1-Mw per liter, it appears that the outermost blanket elements make enough plutonium to pay for the cost of their fabrication and processing, unless the core power density falls well below the expected value. A cyclic motion of elements in the inward radial direction has little effect on the economics if optimum cycling is followed. Moving the blanket elements may have engineering advantages however, such as a uniform buildup and burnup, and less variation in power locally with time. A paste blanket with radial inward motion and axial mixing has a similar behavior. Inclusion of moderating material in a fast reactor blanket is not promising for a high-power density reactor using optimum cycling, but it may prove valuable if blanket fluxes get very low or the residence times of the blanket elements are limited.