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!
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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.
Pedro Mena, R. A. Borrelli, Leslie Kerby
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 2 | February 2022 | Pages 232-245
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2021.1905470
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Artificial intelligence is becoming a larger part of operations for many industries. One industry where this is occurring rapidly is the nuclear industry. Researchers from around the world are looking to implement this technology in various areas of the nuclear industry. This paper explores the use of machine learning to diagnose problems. This project makes use of synthetic data collected from a Generic Pressurized Water Reactor (GPWR) simulator on whether a reactor is operating normally or experiencing one of four different transient events. A dataset was created consisting of over 30 000 reactor operational states. The data were explored and wrangled using Python and the Pandas package, using a variety of methods. Once ready, the data were randomly shuffled, with half the data being used for training and the other half being used for testing. Six different machine learning models were created using scikit-learn and the AutoML package Tree-based Pipeline Optimization Tool (TPOT). These models were created using six data scaling methods along with six feature reduction/selection methods. These models were validated using accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. The accuracy of the individual transients was also calculated. All six of the models had validation scores above 95%, with the decision tree and logistic regression models performing the best. These results are promising for the possible future use of machine learning in reactor diagnostics.