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.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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
Dec 2025
Jul 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
January 2026
Nuclear Technology
December 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
November 2025
Latest News
AI at work: Southern Nuclear’s adoption of Copilot agents drives fleet forward
Southern Nuclear is leading the charge in artificial intelligence integration, with employee-developed applications driving efficiencies in maintenance, operations, safety, and performance.
The tools span all roles within the company, with thousands of documented uses throughout the fleet, including improved maintenance efficiency, risk awareness in maintenance activities, and better-informed decision-making. The data-intensive process of preparing for and executing maintenance operations is streamlined by leveraging AI to put the right information at the fingertips for maintenance leaders, planners, schedulers, engineers, and technicians.
Michael W. J. Lewis, Charles S. Campbell
Nuclear Technology | Volume 55 | Number 2 | November 1981 | Pages 460-469
Technical Paper | Materials | doi.org/10.13182/NT55-460
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Steam generators for liquid-metal fast breeder reactors may be subject both to fretting wear as a result of flow-induced vibrations and to wear from larger amplitude sliding movements caused by thermal changes. Wear under these conditions is strongly adhesive so that in tests simulating the larger amplitude sliding of tubing through support plates, mechanical interaction of the wear scars results in high pseudo-friction forces for ferritic steels at the extremities of movement. With austenitic steel combinations in such tests, less wear is found but at temperatures above 500°C static adhesion after a period of dwell can give increased axial forces to initiate sliding, for example, up to three times the contact force at 560°C. A number of test mechanisms have been developed to evaluate the impact, impact-slide, and rubbing fretting behavior of these materials in sodium. With hemisphere-on-flat geometry, specific wear rates for austenitic steel combinations in impact-slide increase with temperature and decrease with time, while specific wear rates for ferritic steel combinations are approximately an order of magnitude greater (10−14 to 10−13 m3/Nm). In rubbing fretting, wear rates are broadly similar for austenitic and ferritic steel combinations. Specific wear rates decrease with slip amplitude and are of the order of 3 × 10−16 m3/Nm at 10 µm and 3 × 10−15 m3/Nm in excess of 100 µm.