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Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Division Spotlight
Aerospace Nuclear Science & Technology
Organized to promote the advancement of knowledge in the use of nuclear science and technologies in the aerospace application. Specialized nuclear-based technologies and applications are needed to advance the state-of-the-art in aerospace design, engineering and operations to explore planetary bodies in our solar system and beyond, plus enhance the safety of air travel, especially high speed air travel. Areas of interest will include but are not limited to the creation of nuclear-based power and propulsion systems, multifunctional materials to protect humans and electronic components from atmospheric, space, and nuclear power system radiation, human factor strategies for the safety and reliable operation of nuclear power and propulsion plants by non-specialized personnel and more.
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.
Olivier Bardon, Ludovic Garnier
Nuclear Technology | Volume 201 | Number 2 | February 2018 | Pages 103-112
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1409054
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Used nuclear fuel transportation casks are subjected to a permanent heat load that must be released in the air by passive dissipation as natural convection and infrared radiation. Because of the large size of the cask, natural convection operates in nonisothermal conditions at very high Rayleigh numbers where few experimental works exist and where computational fluid dynamics codes are often not representative. Thermal tests are then needed to estimate and check thermal designs. This work is a starting point of a research and development program that aims to improve the knowledge of natural convective heat transfer around casks, to explain the effect of a design parameter such as fins, and finally to propose and check improved solutions. In this work, we present the qualification of a mock-up that has been set up to measure the local heat convective coefficient of a fin-equipped cask in transport conditions. The geometry concerns short axial fins that are widely used on transportation/storage casks. The first results show a large variation of the heat convective coefficient along the cask from a constant low level at the bottom and then a linearly increasing level leading to a maximum value close to the top that is strongly temperature dependent.