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
Aerospace Nuclear Science & Technology
Organized to promote the advancement of knowledge in the use of nuclear science and technologies in the aerospace application. Specialized nuclear-based technologies and applications are needed to advance the state-of-the-art in aerospace design, engineering and operations to explore planetary bodies in our solar system and beyond, plus enhance the safety of air travel, especially high speed air travel. Areas of interest will include but are not limited to the creation of nuclear-based power and propulsion systems, multifunctional materials to protect humans and electronic components from atmospheric, space, and nuclear power system radiation, human factor strategies for the safety and reliable operation of nuclear power and propulsion plants by non-specialized personnel and more.
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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Latest News
ARPA-E announces $40 million to develop transmutation technologies for UNF
The Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) announced $40 million in funding to develop cutting-edge technologies to enable the transmutation of used nuclear fuel into less-radioactive substances. According to ARPA-E, the new initiative addresses one of the agency’s core goals as outlined by Congress: to provide transformative solutions to improve the management, cleanup, and disposal of radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel.
Dan G. Cacuci, Federico Di Rocco
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 185 | Number 3 | March 2017 | Pages 484-548
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2017.1279940
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A cooling tower discharges waste heat produced by an industrial plant to the external environment. The amount of thermal energy discharged into the environment can be determined by measurements of quantities representing the external conditions, such as outlet air temperature, outlet water temperature, and outlet air relative humidity, in conjunction with computational models that simulate numerically the cooling tower’s behavior. Variations in the model’s parameters (e.g., material properties, model correlations, boundary conditions) cause variations in the model’s response. The functional derivatives of the model response with respect to the model parameters (called “sensitivities”) are needed to quantify such response variations changes. In this work, the comprehensive adjoint sensitivity analysis methodology for nonlinear systems is applied to compute the cooling tower’s response sensitivities to all of its model parameters. These sensitivities are used in this work for (1) ranking the model parameters according to the magnitude of their contribution to response uncertainties; (2) propagating the uncertainties in the model’s parameters to quantify the uncertainties in the model’s responses. In an accompanying work, these sensitivities are subsequently used for predictive modeling, combining computational and experimental information, including the respective uncertainties, to obtain optimally predicted best-estimate nominal values for the model’s parameters and responses, with reduced predicted uncertainties.