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Division Spotlight
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
Niranjan Gudibande, Kannan Iyer
Nuclear Technology | Volume 196 | Number 3 | December 2016 | Pages 674-683
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NT16-40
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Radioactive materials are transported in hollow steel casks filled with lead. The lead in these casks can melt in an accidental fire during transportation leading to an increase in its volume. This plastically deforms the steel shell housing the lead. When the cask subsequently cools after the fire is extinguished, voids will form in the solidified lead. This work deals with the simulation of solidification with void formation in these transportation casks. In these simulations, one has to deal with solid-liquid and void-material interfaces. Solid-liquid movement during solidification is treated using a modified enthalpy method. The void that is formed in the solidified lead is assumed to be a vacuum. Consistent with this assumption, the boundary conditions of zero pressure and zero stress are imposed on the interface. The growth of the void is handled using the volume of fluid method. The methodology is first benchmarked by comparing the simulations with some experimental results available in the literature. Simulations are then performed for solidification in the transportation cask to study the effect of orientation on the void formation. A methodology is then developed to quantify the overall shielding effectiveness of the cask in terms of the total amount of radiation leaked.