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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.
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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
Norway’s Halden reactor takes first step toward decommissioning
The government of Norway has granted the transfer of the Halden research reactor from the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) to the state agency Norwegian Nuclear Decommissioning (NND). The 25-MWt Halden boiling water reactor operated from 1958 to 2018 and was used in the research of nuclear fuel, reactor internals, plant procedures and monitoring, and human factors.
Lubomír Bureš, Stefano Caruso
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 191 | Number 1 | July 2018 | Pages 66-84
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2018.1442059
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Knowledge of the radionuclide inventory in spent nuclear fuel is important for back-end operations such as fuel transport and storage, but it is also relevant for the postclosure safety case for a deep geological repository. Extensive depletion calculations using neutron transport solvers can be time consuming and resource intensive in the case of characterization of a large number of fuel assemblies. Issues of computational demand are further amplified when the inventory of only a single pin from the assembly is desired.
A new approach to speeding up the computational time without significant loss of accuracy is proposed in this work, consisting of simplification of the modeled geometry by means of stochastic optimization. The development of this novel methodology, the Acropolis methodology, is described in detail in this paper. Additionally, extensive benchmark and validation exercises were carried out to present and discuss the advantages and limitations of the proposed method.