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Division Spotlight
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
Meeting Spotlight
2027 ANS Winter Conference and Expo
October 31–November 4, 2027
Washington, DC|The Westin Washington, DC 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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Disney World should have gone nuclear
There is extra significance to the American Nuclear Society holding its annual meeting in Orlando, Florida, this past week. That’s because in 1967, the state of Florida passed a law allowing Disney World to build a nuclear power plant.
Xia Bing, Jiong Guo, Chunlin Wei, Ding She, Jian Zhang, Fu Li (Tsinghua Univ)
Proceedings | 16th International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management Conference (IHLRWM 2017) | Charlotte, NC, April 9-13, 2017 | Pages 848-852
The pebble bed high temperature reactors (PB-HTRs) are one of the promising reactor types for the next generation nuclear systems. Some intrinsic features of the PB-HTRs’ spherical fuel element embedded with the TRISO coated fuel particles bring high proliferation-resistance to the PB-HTR spent fuel storage, including the continuous on-line fueling strategy, the difficulty of processing TRISO particles, the low heavy metal density in the fuel pebbles and the high depletion of plutonium. The material accountancy concept and methodology of PB-HTR spent fuel storage are proposed in this work. For PB-HTRs, the spent fuel storage should be treated as an item facility; however, the items in PB-HTR spent fuel storage are the spent fuel containers, instead of the spent fuel assemblies in conventional PWR’s spent fuel storage. The accountancy of nuclear material should be implemented by evaluating the average burnup value of a batch of spent fuels. For the equilibrium core of PB-HTR, the average burnup value of a batch of spent fuel pebbles is determined by the integral power during the period when these pebbles are unloaded from the reactor core. Furthermore, the burnup value of each spent fuel pebble can also be measured by gamma spectroscopy upon the long-lived fission product 137Cs. After evaluating the spent fuel burnup, the dependency of the amounts of heavy metal nuclides upon the burnup value of a spent fuel pebble is estimated by the depletion calculations. It is revealed that the non-proliferation features of PB-HTR spent fuel storage is excellent and the accountancy methodology proposed in this work is feasible. Besides the high safety features, the high proliferation-resistance can be another attraction of the PB-HTRs.