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Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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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Glass strategy: Hanford’s enhanced waste glass program
The mission of the Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection (ORP) is to complete the safe cleanup of waste resulting from decades of nuclear weapons development. One of the most technologically challenging responsibilities is the safe disposition of approximately 56 million gallons of radioactive waste historically stored in 177 tanks at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
ORP has a clear incentive to reduce the overall mission duration and cost. One pathway is to develop and deploy innovative technical solutions that can advance baseline flow sheets toward higher efficiency operations while reducing identified risks without compromising safety. Vitrification is the baseline process that will convert both high-level and low-level radioactive waste at Hanford into a stable glass waste form for long-term storage and disposal.
Although vitrification is a mature technology, there are key areas where technology can further reduce operational risks, advance baseline processes to maximize waste throughput, and provide the underpinning to enhance operational flexibility; all steps in reducing mission duration and cost.
Akio Yamamoto, Hiroshi Hashimoto
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 136 | Number 2 | October 2000 | Pages 247-257
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE00-A2155
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Temperature parallel simulated annealing (TPSA) was applied to in-core fuel management optimizations, and the optimization performance was evaluated by comparing TPSA with traditional simulated annealing (SA). The TPSA method is an optimization algorithm that is based on SA, but has several distinguishing features: an automatic temperature annealing schedule, time homogeneity, and a significant affinity with parallel execution. The calculation results of a test problem revealed that TPSA was superior to traditional SA in terms of detailed loading pattern optimizations. The reason for this is that the TPSA temperature annealing schedule can effectively avoid local optima by repeating a cooling and heating cycle automatically.
