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
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
May 2025
Nuclear Technology
April 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
First astatine-labeled compound shipped in the U.S.
The Department of Energy’s National Isotope Development Center (NIDC) on March 31 announced the successful long-distance shipment in the United States of a biologically active compound labeled with the medical radioisotope astatine-211 (At-211). Because previous shipments have included only the “bare” isotope, the NIDC has described the development as “unleashing medical innovation.”
Priscila Palma Sanchez, Adimir dos Santos
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 195 | Number 5 | May 2021 | Pages 555-562
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1854541
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In order to ensure safety in a nuclear power plant, operation and protection systems must take into account safety parameters, whether to guide operators or to trip the reactor in emergency cases. Especially in a boron-free small modular reactor (SMR) where reactivity and power are controlled exclusively by rod banks, the power distribution is mostly influenced by its movements affecting the power peaking factor (PPF), which is an important parameter to be considered. The PPF relates the maximum local linear power density to the average power density in a fuel rod indicating a high neutron flux that can cause fuel rod damage. In this technical note, 2117 samples from simulations of an idealized boron-free SMR controlled exclusively by rod banks were used to generate a Support Vector Machine (SVM) model capable of estimating the PPF as a function of control rod bank positions. Such model could be used to predict the maximum PPF in the reactor core by carrying out simple calculation. Residing in a SVM parameter grid search and a 10-cross-validation process in the training set to reach an optimized and robust model, the results have shown a root-mean-squared error of about 0.1% consistent for both training and testing sets.