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
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
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
May 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
TerraPower begins U.K. regulatory approval process
Seattle-based TerraPower signaled its interest this week in building its Natrium small modular reactor in the United Kingdom, the company announced.
TerraPower sent a letter to the U.K.’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, formally establishing its intention to enter the U.K. generic design assessment (GDA) process. This is TerraPower’s first step in deployment of its Natrium technology—a 345-MW sodium fast reactor coupled with a molten salt energy storage unit—on the international stage.
Min Lee, Ein-Chun Wu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 100 | Number 1 | October 1992 | Pages 39-51
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT92-A34752
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The long-term responses of the reactor coolant system and the containment of a boiling water reactor (BWR) during an anticipated transient without scram (ATWS) initiated by an inadvertent closure of the main steam isolation valves (MSIVs) are analyzed with the MAAP 3.0B computer code. The plant used in the analysis is the Kuosheng nuclear power station, a General Electric BWR6 reactor with a Mark III containment. A comparison of near-term system responses to an MSIV closure ATWS event shows that the MAAP 3.0B code fails to reproduce the detailed thermal-hydraulic results of the sophisticated RETRAN-02 code. The MAAP code, however, makes a reasonable prediction of the timing of major events and core power in the ATWS accident analyzed. The results of a long-term MAAP ATWS analysis show that if the standby liquid control system fails in an MSIV closure ATWS event, the ATWS event might develop into a core melt accident with the containment failing before the core melts. Among the ATWS mitigation actions specified in the emergency operating procedures, manual actuation of the automatic depressurization system (ADS) as the suppression pool temperature reaches a limit specified by the heat capacity temperature limit curve had the greatest effect on the timing of the containment failure. The reduction of the high-pressure system injection rate coupled with a delay in ADS actuation until failure of the high-pressure injection system could effectively delay the containment failure of an unmitigated ATWS event.
