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
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
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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.
Dan Shen, Germina Ilas, Jeffrey J. Powers, Massimiliano Fratoni
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 195 | Number 8 | August 2021 | Pages 825-837
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2021.1880850
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The deployment of molten salt reactors requires validation of the computational tools used to support the licensing process. The Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE), built and operated in the 1960s, offers a unique inventory of experimental data for reactor physics benchmarks. The first benchmark based on the MSRE appeared in “The 2019 Edition of the IRPhEP [International Reactor Physics Experiment Evaluation Project] Handbook.” The benchmark refers to the first criticality experiment at zero power, stationary salt, and uniform temperature with 235U fuel. Simulations carried out for the developed benchmark model with the Monte Carlo code Serpent and ENDF/B-VII.1 cross-section library found that the calculated neutron multiplication is 1.02132 (±3 pcm) and that the combined bias of the model and experimental uncertainty is below 500 pcm. Such discrepancy between the experimental and calculated keff is not uncommon in benchmarks for graphite-moderated systems. The model created through this effort paves the way to additional benchmarks targeting reactor physics quantities of interest beyond multiplication factor.