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Members are devoted to applying nuclear science and engineering technologies involving isotopes, radiation applications, and associated equipment in scientific research, development, and industrial processes. Their interests lie primarily in education, industrial uses, biology, medicine, and health physics. Division committees include Analytical Applications of Isotopes and Radiation, Biology and Medicine, Radiation Applications, Radiation Sources and Detection, and Thermal Power Sources.
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Colin Judge: Testing structural materials in Idaho’s newest hot cell facility
Idaho National Laboratory’s newest facility—the Sample Preparation Laboratory (SPL)—sits across the road from the Hot Fuel Examination Facility (HFEF), which started operating in 1975. SPL will host the first new hot cells at INL’s Materials and Fuels Complex (MFC) in 50 years, giving INL researchers and partners new flexibility to test the structural properties of irradiated materials fresh from the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) or from a partner’s facility.
Materials meant to withstand extreme conditions in fission or fusion power plants must be tested under similar conditions and pushed past their breaking points so performance and limitations can be understood and improved. Once irradiated, materials samples can be cut down to size in SPL and packaged for testing in other facilities at INL or other national laboratories, commercial labs, or universities. But they can also be subjected to extreme thermal or corrosive conditions and mechanical testing right in SPL, explains Colin Judge, who, as INL’s division director for nuclear materials performance, oversees SPL and other facilities at the MFC.
SPL won’t go “hot” until January 2026, but Judge spoke with NN staff writer Susan Gallier about its capabilities as his team was moving instruments into the new facility.
Shivakumar Sitaraman, Young S. Ham, Narek Gharibyan, Orpet J. M. Peixoto, Gustavo Diaz
Nuclear Technology | Volume 192 | Number 1 | October 2015 | Pages 74-83
Technical Paper | Radioactive Waste Management and Disposal | doi.org/10.13182/NT14-63
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Fuel assemblies in the spent fuel pool are stored by suspending them in two vertically stacked layers at the Atucha Unit 1 nuclear power plant (Atucha-I). This introduces the unique problem of verifying the presence of fuel in either layer without physically moving the fuel assemblies. Given that the facility uses both natural uranium and slightly enriched uranium at 0.85 wt% 235U and has been in operation since 1974, a wide range of burnups and cooling times can exist in any given pool. A gross defect detection tool, the spent fuel neutron counter (SFNC), has been used at the site to verify the presence of fuel up to burnups of 8000 MWd/t. At higher discharge burnups, the existing signal processing software of the tool was found to fail due to nonlinearity of the source term with burnup. A new software package based on the LabVIEW platform was developed to predict expected neutron signals covering all ranges of burnups and cooling times. The algorithm employed in the software uses a set of transfer functions that are coupled with source terms based on various cooling times and burnups for each of the two enrichment levels. The software was benchmarked against an extensive set of measured data. Overall, out of 326 data points examined, the software data deviated from the measured data <10% in 87% of the cases. A further 10.5% matched the measurements between 10% and 20%. Thus, 97.5% of the predictions matched the measurements within the set 20% tolerance limit providing proof of the robustness of the software. This software package linked to SFNC will enhance the capability of gross defect verification at both levels in the spent fuel pool for the whole range of burnup, cooling time, and initial enrichments of the spent fuel being discharged into the various pools at the Atucha-I reactor site.