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
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
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.
Allan Hedin
Nuclear Technology | Volume 138 | Number 2 | May 2002 | Pages 179-205
Technical Paper | Radioactive Waste Management and Disposal | doi.org/10.13182/NT02-A3287
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Simple analytic expressions are presented for radionuclide transport from a KBS 3-type repository, where spent nuclear fuel is placed in copper canisters surrounded by bentonite clay and deposited at a depth of 500 m in fractured granitic rock.Dissolution of readily accessible and fuel matrix embedded nuclides, chain decay, and nuclide precipitation is treated within the canister. Transport in the canister void and buffer is modeled with a dual stirred tank analogy, where transport resistances represent an assumed small initial damage in the canister and transport features of the buffer-geosphere interface. Initial, transient diffusion in the buffer is treated with a simple correction term. Chain decay is not included in the buffer.Geosphere transport expressions handle advection, longitudinal dispersion, matrix diffusion, sorption, and radioactive decay, but not chain decay. The treatment is based on earlier results for an instantaneous inlet and for a constant inlet to the geosphere in the nondispersive case. A correction is added so that longitudinal dispersion is taken approximately into account. The correction utilizes analytical expressions for the temporal moments of the geosphere release curve in the dispersive case.The near-field/geosphere integration is treated in a simplified manner avoiding numerical convolutions. The instantaneous inlet expression for the geosphere release is used when the near-field release decreases rapidly in comparison to a typical response time in the geosphere; the constant inlet expression is used in the opposite case.Twenty-seven calculation cases from a safety assessment of a KBS 3 repository using borehole data from three different field investigation sites were repeated with the analytic expressions. The agreement in both near-field and geosphere releases is in general well within an order of magnitude for the variety of long- and short-lived, sorbing, nonsorbing, solubility limited, immediately accessible, and fuel matrix embedded single and ingrowing species dominating the releases and doses in the safety assessment calculations. Also, probabilistic dose calculation results are in good agreement, making the analytic model a versatile complement to the various tools used in long-term safety evaluations of a KBS 3 type of repository in saturated fractured rock.
