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Division Spotlight
Fusion Energy
This division promotes the development and timely introduction of fusion energy as a sustainable energy source with favorable economic, environmental, and safety attributes. The division cooperates with other organizations on common issues of multidisciplinary fusion science and technology, conducts professional meetings, and disseminates technical information in support of these goals. Members focus on the assessment and resolution of critical developmental issues for practical fusion energy applications.
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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February 2025
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.
Shigeaki Tsunoyama, Tohru Mitsutake, Shigeo Ebata, Shirley A. Sandoz
Nuclear Technology | Volume 65 | Number 3 | June 1984 | Pages 374-382
Technical Paper | Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT84-A33392
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Applying an autoregressive (AR) technique to a boiling water reactor stability test yields two kinds of reactor stability performance indexes. One is characterized by the neutron flux to reactor pressure open-loop transfer function. The other is characterized by the closed-loop transfer function. Studies were performed on these reactor core stability indexes, using a one-dimensional transient model. To simulate these two kinds of stability characteristics in the time domain, the input/output relation for the system considered is important. In both cases, the output variable is the neutron flux. For the input state variable, in the case of the open-loop stability index, reactor pressure was chosen and adopted as a boundary variable to enable neglecting the feedback due to change in the reactor dome pressure. In the case of the closed-loop stability index, the vessel steam flow to the main steamline was adopted to separate the reactor response from the main steamline. Employing this procedure, both stability indexes were estimated by the one-dimensional reactor transient model. Comparing these indexes to those evaluated by the AR fitting and Fourier transform of small perturbation test data, it was concluded that the one-dimensional transient model predicts well the open- and closed-loop stability performance. Further, it was shown that the open-loop index conventionally used is a somewhat conservative one.