ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Division Spotlight
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Mar 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
May 2025
Nuclear Technology
April 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
El Salvador: Looking to nuclear
In 2022, El Salvador’s leadership decided to expand its modest, mostly hydro- and geothermal-based electricity system, which is supported by expensive imported natural gas and diesel generation. They chose to use advanced nuclear reactors, preferably fueled by thorium-based fuels, to power their civilian efforts. The choice of thorium was made to inform the world that the reactor program was for civilian purposes only, and so they chose a fuel that was plentiful, easy to source and work with, and not a proliferation risk.
Marina Sessim, Michael R. Tonks
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 7 | July 2021 | Pages 1004-1014
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2021.1910005
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) provides a consistent source of thrust for long space missions. However, fuel development for NTP reactors is a major technological hurdle. Existing modeling and simulation tools developed by the U.S. Nuclear Engineering Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) program for power reactors can be leveraged to help accelerate the fuel development. This work is a preliminary demonstration of the application of NEAMS tools to model NTP fuel. Specifically, the fuel performance tool BISON and the mesoscale reactor materials tool MARMOT are used to develop a multiscale model of thermal transport in a W-UO2 CERMET fuel element for NTP reactors. Three-dimensional simulations in MARMOT are used to estimate the effective thermal conductivity (ETC) of fresh CERMET fuel at temperatures ranging from 1500 K to 3000 K. The ETC values from MARMOT are then used in BISON simulations that predict the steady-state temperature profile throughout a 61-subchannel hexagonal fuel element. The temperature varies by 83 K throughout the fuel element, with the highest temperature occurring near the outer edges of the element. BISON is also used to show that the temperature profile in prototype fuel elements with fewer subchannels does not vary significantly from that in the 61-subchannel element.
