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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
Utility Working Conference and Vendor Technology Expo (UWC 2024)
August 4–7, 2024
Marco Island, FL|JW Marriott Marco Island
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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
August 2024
Nuclear Technology
July 2024
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
NRC engineers share their expertise at the University of Puerto Rico
Robert Roche-Rivera and Marcos Rolón-Acevedo are licensed professional engineers who work at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They are also alumni of the University of Puerto Rico–Mayagüez (UPRM) and have been sharing their knowledge and experience with students at their alma mater since last year, serving as adjunct professors in the university’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. During the 2023–2024 school year, they each taught two courses: Fundamentals of Nuclear Science and Engineering, and Nuclear Power Plant Engineering.
Robert B. Hayes
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 3 | March 2021 | Pages 460-467
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1762472
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The standard approach in nuclear criticality safety analysis is to rely quite heavily—and in some cases exclusively—on passive controls, such as assuming all worst-case conditions are by default attained. This means assumptions are made such as no poison, optimum moderation, and pure fissile actinide content at the maximum mass with optimum full reflection. What is clearly attainable is something less than any of these extremal conditions, but how can one rely on a limit based on assuming less than the worst case without some controls ensuring those assumptions are not challenged? This technical note discusses various options for approaching a defendable realistic technical basis for safety analysis by associating probabilities with conservative assumptions.