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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
ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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
Corporate powerhouses join pledge to triple nuclear energy by 2050
Following in the steps of an international push to expand nuclear power capacity, a group of powerhouse corporations signed and announced a pledge today to support the goal of at least tripling global nuclear capacity by 2050.
Jonathan G. Teague, Roberta N. Mulford
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 8 | August 2020 | Pages 1195-1212
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1701345
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Impact testing of general purpose heat sources (GPHSs) and their component GPHS clads is done to benchmark extensive safety calculations quantifying launch safety. Impact testing is done in the Isotope Fuels Impact Tester (IFIT), a large-bore gas gun at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Efforts to conduct an impact test at the extreme low end of the temperature range for launch have highlighted uncertainties in determining the GPHS clad temperature during impact tests. In IFIT impact tests, the GPHS clad temperature is inferred from the temperature of the radiological confinement. Heating tests have been done in the IFIT to determine the fueled clad surface temperature as a function of the surface temperature of the tantalum radiological confinement can. Direct measurement of clad temperatures in the impact configuration are described and the effect of emissivity of the various components indicated. The analytical model used to predict clad temperatures is seen to work well at temperatures above 625°C. Appropriate values of emissivity for use in the model were measured in the experiment. Calculation of the experimental clad impact temperature using the ANSYS thermal transport model is necessary at clad temperatures below 625°C. ANSYS modeling indicates that the clad temperature in a recent low-temperature impact was outside the relevant range for launch safety modeling of GPHS clad behavior.