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Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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Colin Judge: Testing structural materials in Idaho’s newest hot cell facility
Idaho National Laboratory’s newest facility—the Sample Preparation Laboratory (SPL)—sits across the road from the Hot Fuel Examination Facility (HFEF), which started operating in 1975. SPL will host the first new hot cells at INL’s Materials and Fuels Complex (MFC) in 50 years, giving INL researchers and partners new flexibility to test the structural properties of irradiated materials fresh from the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) or from a partner’s facility.
Materials meant to withstand extreme conditions in fission or fusion power plants must be tested under similar conditions and pushed past their breaking points so performance and limitations can be understood and improved. Once irradiated, materials samples can be cut down to size in SPL and packaged for testing in other facilities at INL or other national laboratories, commercial labs, or universities. But they can also be subjected to extreme thermal or corrosive conditions and mechanical testing right in SPL, explains Colin Judge, who, as INL’s division director for nuclear materials performance, oversees SPL and other facilities at the MFC.
SPL won’t go “hot” until January 2026, but Judge spoke with NN staff writer Susan Gallier about its capabilities as his team was moving instruments into the new facility.
A. Labarile, C. Mesado, R. Miró, G. Verdú
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 12 | December 2019 | Pages 1675-1684
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1631051
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the challenges of studying the neutronics of reactors is to generate reliable parameterized libraries that contain information to simulate the core in all possible operational and transient conditions. These libraries must include tables of cross sections and other neutronic and kinetic parameters and are obtained by simulating all the segments in a transport code. At the lattice level, one can use branch calculations to change “instantaneously” the feedback parameters as a function of burnup. When using random sampling for the lattice calculations, one can obtain statistical information about the output parameters and use it in a core simulation to characterize the accuracy of data estimating uncertainties when simulating a heterogeneous system at different scales of detail.
This work presents the methodology to generate NEMTAB libraries from data obtained in the SCALE code system to be used in PARCS simulations. The code TXT2NTAB is used to reorder the cross-section tables in NEMTAB format and generate another NEMTAB of standard deviation. With these libraries, the authors perform a steady-state calculation for a light water reactor to propagate several uncertainties at the core level. The methodology allows obtaining statistical information of the most important output parameters: multiplication factor keff, axial power peak Pz, and axial peak node Nz.