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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.
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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.
E. E. Lewis, M. A. Smith, G. Palmiotti
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 161 | Number 3 | March 2009 | Pages 279-288
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE161-279
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new paradigm that increases the efficiency of whole-core neutron transport calculations without lattice homogenization is introduced. Quasi-reflected interface conditions are formulated to partially decouple periodic lattice effects from global flux gradients. The starting point is the finite subelement form of the variational nodal code VARIANT that eliminates fuel-coolant homogenization through the use of heterogeneous nodes. The interface spherical harmonics expansions that couple pin-cell-sized nodes are divided into low-order and high-order terms, and reflected interface conditions are applied to the high-order terms. Combined with an integral transport method within the node, the new approach dramatically reduces both the formation time and the dimensions of the nodal response matrices and leads to sharply reduced memory requirements and computational time. The method is applied to the two-dimensional C5G7 problem, an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development/Nuclear Energy Agency pressurized water reactor benchmark containing mixed oxide (MOX) and UO2 fuel assemblies, as well as to a three-dimensional MOX fuel assembly. Results indicate the new approach results in very little loss of accuracy relative to the corresponding full spherical harmonics expansions while reducing computational times by well over an order of magnitude.