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
Aerospace Nuclear Science & Technology
Organized to promote the advancement of knowledge in the use of nuclear science and technologies in the aerospace application. Specialized nuclear-based technologies and applications are needed to advance the state-of-the-art in aerospace design, engineering and operations to explore planetary bodies in our solar system and beyond, plus enhance the safety of air travel, especially high speed air travel. Areas of interest will include but are not limited to the creation of nuclear-based power and propulsion systems, multifunctional materials to protect humans and electronic components from atmospheric, space, and nuclear power system radiation, human factor strategies for the safety and reliable operation of nuclear power and propulsion plants by non-specialized personnel and more.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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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June 2025
Nuclear Technology
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May 2025
Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
Ralph Wiser, Emilio Baglietto
Nuclear Technology | Volume 210 | Number 7 | July 2024 | Pages 1143-1166
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2023.2202802
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Turbulent heat transfer in buoyancy-dominated flows is a challenging problem for computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Many authors attribute model error in these conditions to the Reynolds analogy. We leverage a brand-new direct numerical simulation database to evaluate the performance of several popular turbulence models in buoyant diabatic channel flow. We find that heat transfer results are relatively accurate, with a Nusselt number error less than 20%. However, the turbulent flow solution is very inaccurate, with wall shear overpredicted by up to 100%. This indicates significant turbulence model error in such flows. We determined that the dominant sources of model error are missing physics in the algebraic Reynolds stress framework and the simple buoyancy production term used in industrial CFD. We suggest that future modeling efforts focus on these two sources of model error. We demonstrate that the Reynolds analogy is not the dominant source of model error.