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
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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Latest News
ARG-US Remote Monitoring Systems: Use Cases and Applications in Nuclear Facilities and During Transportation
As highlighted in the Spring 2024 issue of Radwaste Solutions, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory are developing and deploying ARG-US—meaning “Watchful Guardian”—remote monitoring systems technologies to enhance the safety, security, and safeguards (3S) of packages of nuclear and other radioactive material during storage, transportation, and disposal.
F. J. Arias
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 178 | Number 2 | October 2014 | Pages 240-249
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE13-88
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The phenomenology for a particular behavior of packed beds in heavy liquid metal (HLM) fast reactors during postaccident heat removal is proposed. Because of the similar densities of the fuel and the HLM, an inherent passive safety self-removal feedback mechanism due to buoyancy forces is developed, which propels the packed bed away from the wall, thus preventing temperatures that can jeopardize the vessel’s structural integrity and also reducing the recriticality potential by limiting the allowable bed depth. This identified mechanism will have somewhat compensatory tendencies in the self-leveling behavior of debris beds, which are crucial for sodium-cooled reactors, but unfortunately, it is not operative for HLMs because of the absence of boiling of the coolant. By means of a simplified geometrical model, a preliminary analysis of the potentiality of the phenomenon has been performed.