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
Utility Working Conference and Vendor Technology Expo (UWC 2024)
August 4–7, 2024
Marco Island, FL|JW Marriott Marco Island
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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August 2024
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July 2024
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Latest News
NRC engineers share their expertise at the University of Puerto Rico
Robert Roche-Rivera and Marcos Rolón-Acevedo are licensed professional engineers who work at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They are also alumni of the University of Puerto Rico–Mayagüez (UPRM) and have been sharing their knowledge and experience with students at their alma mater since last year, serving as adjunct professors in the university’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. During the 2023–2024 school year, they each taught two courses: Fundamentals of Nuclear Science and Engineering, and Nuclear Power Plant Engineering.
Nicholas W. Touran, John C. Lee
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 179 | Number 1 | January 2015 | Pages 85-103
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE13-85
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We developed a simulation tool that accelerates the evaluation of design changes on the equilibrium cycle of fast-spectrum nuclear reactors. Within the tool, an implicit equilibrium cycle search is accelerated by a modal expansion perturbation method that expands arbitrary flux perturbations on a large basis of λ-eigenmode harmonics. The harmonics are computed only at the reference state using Krylov subspace iterative methods, and substantial perturbations from this state are shown to be well approximated by computationally efficient algebraic expressions. The modal expansion method is coupled to the equilibrium method to produce the later-in-time response of each design perturbation, resulting in an explicit perturbation-accelerated equilibrium cycle method. Because the method determines the perturbed flux explicitly, a wide variety of core performance metrics may be tracked within optimization frameworks, including the performance of thermal hydraulics, fuel, economics, core mechanical, and transients. This capability strongly differentiates the method from traditional generalized perturbation theory approaches. The motivating end-use of the method is to evaluate objective functions in multidisciplinary optimization of advanced reactor designs, though many other applications are envisioned.