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
Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
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
Feb 2025
Jul 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
March 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
February 2025
Latest News
Colin Judge: Testing structural materials in Idaho’s newest hot cell facility
Idaho National Laboratory’s newest facility—the Sample Preparation Laboratory (SPL)—sits across the road from the Hot Fuel Examination Facility (HFEF), which started operating in 1975. SPL will host the first new hot cells at INL’s Materials and Fuels Complex (MFC) in 50 years, giving INL researchers and partners new flexibility to test the structural properties of irradiated materials fresh from the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) or from a partner’s facility.
Materials meant to withstand extreme conditions in fission or fusion power plants must be tested under similar conditions and pushed past their breaking points so performance and limitations can be understood and improved. Once irradiated, materials samples can be cut down to size in SPL and packaged for testing in other facilities at INL or other national laboratories, commercial labs, or universities. But they can also be subjected to extreme thermal or corrosive conditions and mechanical testing right in SPL, explains Colin Judge, who, as INL’s division director for nuclear materials performance, oversees SPL and other facilities at the MFC.
SPL won’t go “hot” until January 2026, but Judge spoke with NN staff writer Susan Gallier about its capabilities as his team was moving instruments into the new facility.
Joseph R. Burns, David Chandler (ORNL), Bojan Petrovic (Georgia Tech), Kurt A. Terrani (ORNL)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 738-745
The application of advanced manufacturing to the fabrication of control elements (CEs) for the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) is under investigation at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Advanced manufacturing yields a unique CE design with lumped neutron absorbers, necessitating investigation of the neutronic implications of employing this novel CE design in HFIR. This work assesses the operational performance of advanced manufactured CEs in HFIR throughout their useful lifetime. CE depletion calculations are carried out for long residence time (50 cycles) under several predictor-corrector approximation schemes of varying rigor, with their reactivity worth evaluated at beginning, middle, and end of life. While coarse temporal divisions of the long CE irradiation time yield prominent discrepancies in the isotopic content predicted by each approximation, the corresponding reactivity worth predictions are reasonably consistent across approximations. Further, regardless of the approximation employed, the reactivity worth of the advanced manufactured CEs is found to be comparable to that of the original CEs throughout their useful lifetime. The core power distribution is also not prohibitively perturbed by the introduction of the new CE design at any time in the CE life. Pending irradiation characterization testing, it may thus be concluded that the advanced manufactured CE design can successfully replace the current design and is neutronically feasible for the operation of HFIR.