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Nuclear Installations Safety
Devoted specifically to the safety of nuclear installations and the health and safety of the public, this division seeks a better understanding of the role of safety in the design, construction and operation of nuclear installation facilities. The division also promotes engineering and scientific technology advancement associated with the safety of such facilities.
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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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.
Evgueny P. Shabalin
Nuclear Technology | Volume 99 | Number 3 | September 1992 | Pages 280-288
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT92-A34712
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Physicists dealing with conventional reactor dynamics recognize two types of instability and reactor behavior beyond the stability region: asymptotic excur sions and nonlinear periodic oscillations. A periodically pulsed reactor (PPR) has another peculiar instability: Under certain conditions, its power tends to oscillate at a frequency just twice less than the reactor pulsation frequency. The PPR dynamics far beyond the stability region are analyzed by using a discrete nonlinear model. A PPR with a negative temperature reactivity effect inevitably shows the chaotic power pulse energy behavior known as “deterministic chaos.” The way by which a reactor goes to chaos is defined by the time de pendence of the feedback and by the kind of dynamics model used. The most usual case is a Feigenbaum transition in which the PPR passes through an infinite cascade of oscillation period doubling before chaotic motion appears. The transition of PPR to random behavior through the Feigenbaum scenario must be considered to be “safe.”