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Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy
The mission of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy Division (NNPD) is to promote the peaceful use of nuclear technology while simultaneously preventing the diversion and misuse of nuclear material and technology through appropriate safeguards and security, and promotion of nuclear nonproliferation policies. To achieve this mission, the objectives of the NNPD are to: Promote policy that discourages the proliferation of nuclear technology and material to inappropriate entities. Provide information to ANS members, the technical community at large, opinion leaders, and decision makers to improve their understanding of nuclear nonproliferation issues. Become a recognized technical resource on nuclear nonproliferation, safeguards, and security issues. Serve as the integration and coordination body for nuclear nonproliferation activities for the ANS. Work cooperatively with other ANS divisions to achieve these objective nonproliferation policies.
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!
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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.
Nicolas P. Leclaire, Jacques A. Anno, Gérard Courtois, Pascal Dannus, Gilles Poullot, Veronique Rouyer
Nuclear Technology | Volume 144 | Number 3 | December 2003 | Pages 303-323
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT03-A3447
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Up to now, criticality safety experts used density laws fitted on experimental data and applied them outside the measurement range. Depending on the case, such an approach could be wrong for nitrate solutions. Seven components are concerned: UO2(NO3)2, U(NO3)4, Pu(NO3)4, Pu(NO3)3, Th(NO3)4, Am(NO3)3, and HNO3. To obviate this problem, a new methodology based on the thermodynamic concept of mixtures of binary electrolytes solutions (one electrolyte + water) at constant water activity, a so-called "isopiestic" solution, has been developed by the Institute de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire (IRSN) to calculate the nitrate solutions density. This paper presents its qualification by using criticality experiments. The theory and the implementation are also given.Qualification results of the uranyl and plutonium nitrate solutions show that the new density law (also called the isopiestic law) is in good agreement with the benchmarks. Thus, no bias is put into evidence for the uranium solutions, and a small negative bias equal to 0.2% is found for the plutonium solutions.Moreover, the isopiestic law corrects the observed 1% overestimation of keff due to the empirical IRSN Leroy and Jouan density law for uranium solutions and the observed 3.4% underestimation of keff due to the ARH-600 density law for plutonium solutions.The isopiestic density law has been implemented in CIGALES V2.0, the graphical user interface of the French criticality safety package CRISTAL that calculates the atom densities of nuclides (and writes the input file for CRISTAL computations).
