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
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
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.
Xinyu Zhao, Eugene Shwageraus (Univ of Cambridge)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 198-205
GeN-FOAM is a multi-physics solver based on the OpenFOAM library developed at PSI/EPFL, Switzerland for transient analyses of fast reactors. The current version of GeN-FOAM can simulate a wide range of transients with flexible spatial resolution. One of the main limitations of the current version, however, is relatively simple fuel temperature calculation model. Also, the effects of fuel structural and dimensional changes as a function of temperature, composition and burnup are currently not considered. This work first presents the integration of an advanced fuel performance modelling tool TRANSURANUS developed at Joint Research Centre (JRC)-Karlsruhe into the GeN-Foam solver. The new coupled tool is referred to as the GeN-transFoam. The original GeN-Foam doesn't have burnup calculation capability which makes it very inconvenient to simulate a reactor at the end of cycle, especially when an accurate fuel behaviour prediction is expected. The paper reports a simple way to implement the burnup calculation, given the configuration of the GeN-Foam solver. The GeNtransFoam solver with account for burnup effects is used to analysis the European Sodium Fast Reactor (ESFR) at the end of cycle (EOC) in steady state condition. The neutronics calculation results are compared with results provided by Monte Carlo calculation. In the end, the burnup calculation in the code is discussed.
