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
Isotopes & Radiation
Members are devoted to applying nuclear science and engineering technologies involving isotopes, radiation applications, and associated equipment in scientific research, development, and industrial processes. Their interests lie primarily in education, industrial uses, biology, medicine, and health physics. Division committees include Analytical Applications of Isotopes and Radiation, Biology and Medicine, Radiation Applications, Radiation Sources and Detection, and Thermal Power Sources.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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
June 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
May 2025
Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
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.