A new emph{S}-type eigenvalue localization set for tensors is derived by breaking $N={1,2,cdots,n}$ into disjoint subsets $S$ and its complement. It is proved that this new set is tighter than those presented by Qi (Journal of Symbolic Computation 40 (2005) 1302-1324), Li et al. (Numer. Linear Algebra Appl. 21 (2014) 39-50) and Li et al. (Linear Algebra Appl. 493 (2016) 469-483). As applications, checkable sufficient conditions for the positive definiteness and the positive semi-definiteness of tensors are proposed. Moreover, based on this new set, we establish a new upper bound for the spectral radius of nonnegative tensors and a lower bound for the minimum emph{H}-eigenvalue of weakly irreducible strong emph{M}-tensors in this paper. We demonstrate that these bounds are sharper than those obtained by Li et al. (Numer. Linear Algebra Appl. 21 (2014) 39-50) and He and Huang (J. Inequal. Appl. 114 (2014) 2014). Numerical examples are also given to illustrate this fact.