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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.
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2024 ANS Winter Conference and Expo
November 17–21, 2024
Orlando, FL|Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld
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
Nuclear new build procurement considerations
It may seem counterintuitive, but the best time to enhance the ability to support operations and maintenance for a new plant is before construction starts. This is one of many lessons learned by the currently operating nuclear fleet. As construction and startup of many nuclear facilities was completed, it quickly became evident that the ability to efficiently support operations and maintenance was limited. Most of the information necessary to establish and manage procurement of spare and replacement items, maintenance, and configuration of the facilities was unavailable and had to be gathered on a case-by-case, “on-demand” basis. Absence of necessary information and the associated challenges resulted in the need for staff augmentation and multiyear-long projects to develop equipment bills of material and maintenance programs and to perform technical evaluations for the huge quantities of spare and replacement items being requested.
Guillaume L. Giudicelli, Abdalla Abou-Jaoude, April J. Novak, Ahmed Abdelhameed, Paolo Balestra, Lise Charlot, Jun Fang, Bo Feng, Thomas Folk, Ramiro Freile, Thomas Freyman, Derek Gaston, Logan Harbour, Thanh Hua, Wen Jiang, Nicolas Martin, Yinbin Miao, Jason Miller, Isaac Naupa, Dan O’Grady, David Reger, Emily Shemon, Nicolas Stauff, Mauricio Tano, Stefano Terlizzi, Samuel Walker, Cody Permann
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 8 | August 2023 | Pages 2217-2233
Technical papers from: PHYSOR 2022 | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2142440
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
With the next generation of nuclear reactors under development, modeling and simulation tools are being developed by the U.S. Department of Energy to support their design, licensing, and future operation. Mirroring the physical test beds currently under construction (i.e., Demonstration and Operation of Microreactor Experiments, known as DOME, and Laboratory for Operating and Testing in the United States, known as LOTUS), the Virtual Test Bed was launched by the National Reactor Innovation Center in collaboration with the Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) program to support the advanced reactor community. This collaborative effort, which involves multiple teams at both Idaho National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory, aims to use state-of-the-art simulation tools to model a wide range of reactor designs. These models are automatically tested to ensure their continued functionality as the tools are further developed. Examples are extensively documented, each acting as a tutorial for applying the relevant NEAMS tools to that reactor design. Currently, five advanced reactor types (with a total of 12 specific design subvariants) are simulated by a variety of models. These models range from steady-state, core multiphysics simulations to integrated plant analysis during loss-of-flow transients. To our knowledge, this is the first publicly available library of multiphysics advanced reactor models distributed with extensive documentation and maintained through continuous integration.