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Robotics & Remote Systems
The Mission of the Robotics and Remote Systems Division is to promote the development and application of immersive simulation, robotics, and remote systems for hazardous environments for the purpose of reducing hazardous exposure to individuals, reducing environmental hazards and reducing the cost of performing work.
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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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.
Van Khanh Hoang, Odmaa Sambuu, Jun Nishiyama, Toru Obara
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 7 | July 2023 | Pages 1520-1533
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2153639
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This study assesses a Rotational Fuel-Shuffling Breed-and-Burn (RFBB) fast reactor that operates in breed-and-burn (B&B) mode with a rotational fuel-shuffling scheme and remains within the 200 displacements per atom (DPA) radiation damage constraint of currently verified cladding materials. The design is based on a commercial-scale fast burner reactor called the Super Power Reactor Innovative Small Module (S-PRISM) reactor. To reduce the high DPA values of discharged fuels, the melt-refining process developed in the Experimental Breeder Reactor-II (EBR-II) project is adopted in this study. The effects of the melt-refining process on the performance of the RFBB are investigated via five scenarios and compared with a core to which the melt-refining process is not applied: Scenario I, “Homogenization,” occurs without the removal of fission products (FPs) during the melt-refining process; Scenario II, “Homogenization and FP Removal,” occurs with the removal of FPs to a fraction similar to that in the melt-refining process developed in the EBR-II project; Scenario III, “Homogenization, FP Removal, and Make-Up,” is similar to Scenario II but makes up fuel losses with natural uranium; Scenario IV, “With 1% TRU [transuranics] Losses,” is similar to Scenario III but is evaluated with 1% of actinides not recovered; Scenario V, “With 10% TRU Losses,” is similar to Scenario III but is evaluated with 10% of actinides not recovered. The results show that it is neutronically and thermal hydraulically feasible to establish a B&B mode with the rotational fuel-shuffling scheme and by reconditioning the fuel whenever its cladding reaches its proven 200 DPA radiation damage limit. In Scenario V, the core is subcritical due to a large number of actinides not being recovered during the melt-refining process. The cores of the other scenarios are all critical. The cores of scenarios in which FPs are removed during the melt-refining process have higher excess reactivity than that of the core of Scenario I (“Homogenization”) and that of the core to which the melt-refining process is not applied. The numerical analyses also show that in scenarios that include making up fuel losses during melt refining, the core is fed with more natural uranium make-up fuel during operation and thus has lower burnup. Other characteristics, such as power density distributions, neutron flux profiles, and fertile and fissile nuclide density distributions, are all stable during operation.