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
Utility Working Conference and Vendor Technology Expo (UWC 2024)
August 4–7, 2024
Marco Island, FL|JW Marriott Marco Island
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
Jul 2024
Jan 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
August 2024
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Oklo completes end-to-end demonstration of advanced fuel recycling
Oklo Inc. has announced that it has completed the first end-to-end demonstration of its advanced fuel recycling process as part of an ongoing $5 million project in collaboration with Argonne and Idaho National Laboratories. Oklo’s goal: scaling up its fuel recycling capabilities to deploy a commercial-scale recycling facility that would increase advanced reactor fuel supplies and enhance fuel cost effectiveness for its planned sodium fast reactors.
Tim H. J. J. van der Hagen
Nuclear Technology | Volume 109 | Number 2 | February 1995 | Pages 286-305
Technical Paper | Reactor Control | doi.org/10.13182/NT95-A35061
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The application of an artificial neural network (ANN) for boiling water reactor (BWR) stability monitoring was studied. A three-layer perceptron was trained on synthetic autocorrelation functions to estimate the decay ratio and the resonance frequency from measured neutron noise. Training of the ANN was improved by adding noise to the training patterns and by applying nonconventional error definitions in the generalized delta rule. The performance of the developed ANN was compared with those of conventional stability monitoring techniques. Explicit care was taken for generating unbiased test data. It is found that the trained ANN is capable of monitoring the stability of the Dodewaard BWR for four specific cases. By comparing properties such as the false alarm ratio, the alarm failure ratio, and the average time to alarm, it is shown that it performs worse than model-based methods in stability monitoring of exact second-order systems but that it is more robust (better resistant to corruptions of the input data and to deviations of the system at issue from an exact second-order system) than other methods. The latter explains its good performance on the Dodewaard BWR and is promising for the application of an ANN for stability monitoring of other reactors and for other operating conditions.