ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
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Division Spotlight
Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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
Proving DRACO will deliver
The United States is now closer than it has been in over five decades to launching the first nuclear thermal rocket into space, thanks to DRACO—the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Orbit.
Scott R. Hunter, Nickolay V. Lavrik, Panos G. Datskos, Dwight Clayton
Nuclear Technology | Volume 188 | Number 2 | November 2014 | Pages 172-184
Technical Paper | Nuclear Plant Operations and Control | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-136
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Recent advances in technologies for harvesting waste thermal energy from ambient environments present an opportunity to implement truly wireless sensor nodes in nuclear power plants. These sensors could continue to operate during extended station blackouts and during periods when operation of the plant's internal power distribution system has been disrupted. The energy required to power the wireless sensors must be generated using energy harvesting techniques from locally available energy sources, and the energy consumption within the sensor circuitry must therefore be low to minimize power and hence the size requirements of the energy harvester. Harvesting electrical energy from thermal energy sources can be achieved using pyroelectric or thermoelectric conversion techniques. Recent modeling and experimental studies have shown that pyroelectric techniques can be cost-competitive with thermoelectrics in self-powered wireless sensor applications and, using new temperature cycling techniques, have the potential to be several times as efficient as thermoelectrics under comparable operating conditions. The development of a new thermal energy harvester concept, based on temperature cycled pyroelectric thermal-to-electrical energy conversion, is outlined. This paper outlines the modeling of cantilever and pyroelectric structures and single-element devices that demonstrate the potential of this technology for the development of high-efficiency thermal-to-electrical energy conversion devices.