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Division Spotlight
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.
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
RP3C Community of Practice’s fifth anniversary
In February, the Community of Practice (CoP) webinar series, hosted by the American Nuclear Society Standards Board’s Risk-informed, Performance-based Principles and Policies Committee (RP3C), celebrated its fifth anniversary. Like so many online events, these CoPs brought people together at a time when interacting with others became challenging in early 2020. Since the kickoff CoP, which highlighted the impact that systems engineering has on the design of NuScale’s small modular reactor, the last Friday of most months has featured a new speaker leading a discussion on the use of risk-informed, performance-based (RIPB) thinking in the nuclear industry. Providing a venue to convene for people within ANS and those who found their way online by another route, CoPs are an opportunity for the community to receive answers to their burning questions about the subject at hand. With 50–100 active online participants most months, the conversation is always lively, and knowledge flows freely.
Walter Seifritz
Nuclear Technology | Volume 63 | Number 2 | November 1983 | Pages 286-294
Technical Paper | Economic | doi.org/10.13182/NT83-A33288
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A nuclear reactor strategy that involves light water reactors (LWRs) and advanced pressurized water reactors (APWRs) with a high conversion ratio was analyzed in a logistical manner assuming a finite resource of ∼5 million metric tons of natural uranium. The emphasis lies in the treatment of the dynamics of deploying this two-component LWR-APWR system. The result is that the improvement of the uranium utilization is a function of time and reaches its maximum value (a factor of ∼3 compared with the classical plutonium recycling) only at the very end of the cheap natural uranium era. In view of the future role of nuclear energy in covering a substantial part of the global energy demand, it is shown that an LWR-APWR reactor strategy could neither reach an acceptable power level nor would it be able to support such a level over a significant period of time. If we want to raise the nuclear capacity to a reasonable level, the early introduction of the fast breeder reactor is unavoidable.