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
Isotopes & Radiation
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.
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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May 2025
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.
Hiral Kadakia, Andrew Baker, Mark Paulsen
Nuclear Technology | Volume 202 | Number 1 | April 2018 | Pages 71-80
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1419785
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
RETRAN-3D is a versatile and reliable best-estimate five-equation thermal-hydraulic analysis code used for anticipated operational occurrences and for small-break loss-of-coolant accidents transient analysis of light water reactor systems. The RETRAN-3D accumulator model has been revised to predict behavior during short-intermediate and long-term transients in pressurized water reactors. The accumulator is a single-volume, two-region nonequilibrium component model that includes vessel geometry, wall metal mass, and wall and liquid region surface areas as a function of level. The model accounts for heat transfer effects from the vessel wall to the vapor region using a lumped parameter model and accounts for heat transfer from the liquid region to the gas region. Mass and energy balance equations are solved for the liquid region, and an energy equation is solved for the vapor region. A pressure equation of state provides the pressure as a function of the mass and energy of the liquid and vapor regions.
The new model is validated with loss-of-fluid test and semiscale experimental data, demonstrating that the model is capable of predicting the behavior of an accumulator for transients ranging from short term to long term and accounts for the effects of accumulator geometry such as surface area-to-volume ratio.