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
Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
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!
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Nuclear Science and Engineering
August 2024
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Vogtle-3 shuts down for valve issue
One of the new Vogtle units in Georgia was shut down unexpectedly on Monday last week for a valve issue that has since been investigated and repaired. According to multiple local news outlets, Georgia Power reported on July 17 that Unit 3 was back in service.
Southern Company spokesperson Jacob Hawkins confirmed that Vogtle-3 went off line at 9:25 p.m. local time on July 8 “due to lowering water levels in the steam generators caused by a valve issue on one of the three main feedwater pumps.”
Shahla Keyvan, Mark L. Kelly, Xiaolong Song
Nuclear Technology | Volume 119 | Number 3 | September 1997 | Pages 269-275
Technical Paper | Nuclear Fuel Cycle | doi.org/10.13182/NT97-A35402
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Nuclear fuel must be of high quality before being placed into service in a reactor. Nuclear fuel vendors currently use manual inspection for quality control of the nuclear fuel pellets before they are inserted into the zirconium fuel rods and bundled into assemblies. The feasibility of automating the pellet inspection process using artificial neural networks is examined to improve accuracy, speed, and cost; to reduce employee radiation doses; and to provide defect statistics to the fuel manufacturer. Sample nuclear fuel pellets (252 pellets) are photographed and scanned, and appropriate feature extraction techniques are developed and applied to the scanned images. The extracted features are then used as inputs to a backpropagation neural network. The results indicate that a backpropagation neural network is capable of classifying pellets as good (passing) or bad (failing) with high accuracy.