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Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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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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El Salvador: Looking to nuclear
In 2022, El Salvador’s leadership decided to expand its modest, mostly hydro- and geothermal-based electricity system, which is supported by expensive imported natural gas and diesel generation. They chose to use advanced nuclear reactors, preferably fueled by thorium-based fuels, to power their civilian efforts. The choice of thorium was made to inform the world that the reactor program was for civilian purposes only, and so they chose a fuel that was plentiful, easy to source and work with, and not a proliferation risk.
Anthony M. Scopatz, Erich A. Schneider, Jun Li, Man-Sung Yim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 183 | Number 1 | July 2013 | Pages 45-61
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A16991
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Technology development and deployment decisions are justified by weighing their costs against the expected benefits. Multiple nuclear fuel cycle (NFC) simulation models have been devised, some with the aim of quantifying cyclewide sensitivities to variations from base-case scenarios. Base-case sensitivity studies often perturb only one parameter at a time and only in the region around the initial value. This paper details a sensitivity study methodology that applies entropy-based statistical methods of information theory to describe outcomes produced by an NFC model. This supersedes past efforts at sensitivity and uncertainty analysis by allowing a much larger space to be explored. Here, 30 independent fuel cycle parameters for a fast reactor-light water reactor hybrid scenario are varied simultaneously and stochastically. This fuel cycle schema was chosen as a well-known, sufficiently complex model; the underlying statistical methods could be applied to any cycle. This study uses the uncertainty coefficient computed from contingency tables (CTs) to represent the sensitivity of a technology-defining input to the response. The response of interest here was taken to be the deep geologic repository capacity for a given realization of fuel cycle inputs. After computing the uncertainty coefficients, the inputs themselves are sorted based on decreasing sensitivities. Fast reactor used fuel plutonium separations were found to be most important to the cycle. Furthermore, to represent input covariances (the effect of one input on the sensitivity of a second input to the response), a new measure is defined on three-dimensional CTs. This metric is the coefficient of the variation of uncertainty coefficient of two-dimensional slices of the original table. Sorting by this sensitivity of sensitivity metric, the input pair of fast reactor americium separations together with high-level-waste storage time was found to have the largest joint effect on the repository capacity.