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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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
TerraPower begins U.K. regulatory approval process
Seattle-based TerraPower signaled its interest this week in building its Natrium small modular reactor in the United Kingdom, the company announced.
TerraPower sent a letter to the U.K.’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, formally establishing its intention to enter the U.K. generic design assessment (GDA) process. This is TerraPower’s first step in deployment of its Natrium technology—a 345-MW sodium fast reactor coupled with a molten salt energy storage unit—on the international stage.
Yafen Liu, Rui Yan, Yang Zou, Xuzhong Kang, Ruimin Ji, Bo Zhou, Shihe Yu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 204 | Number 2 | November 2018 | Pages 203-212
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1474703
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Zero-power experiments are very important parts in design verification for all reactor types. In the 1970s, in China, at the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics (then, Shanghai Institute of Nuclear Research), a Critical Experiment Device (cold) was established for research on the physics characteristics of the molten salt reactor (MSR), and a series of zero-power experiments was successfully performed; related experimental results were obtained later. The device consisted mainly of graphite moderator and powdered BeF2 – UF4 / ThF4 fuel and could achieve a maximum power of 200 W. The current work is focused on criticality properties with various core configurations and fuel arrangements of this device and the worths of the cadmium rods used in the device. Evaluations on the agreement of calculation results with experimental data showed good results. Discrepancies between the calculation results and the experimental data might be primarily caused by the simulated outermost fuel element positions not being exactly the same as the experimental arrangements and the unmodeled instruments used in the experiments. The findings in this work can be considered a step of verification of simulation methods and calculations for a cold MSR.