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.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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
Sep 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
October 2025
Nuclear Technology
September 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
NNSA awards BWXT $1.5B defense fuels contract
The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration has awarded BWX Technologies a contract valued at $1.5 billion to build a Domestic Uranium Enrichment Centrifuge Experiment (DUECE) pilot plant in Tennessee in support of the administration’s efforts to build out a domestic supply of unobligated enriched uranium for defense-related nuclear fuel.
F. T. Avignone III, L. P. Hopkins, Z. D. Greenwood
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 72 | Number 2 | November 1979 | Pages 216-221
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE79-A19465
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The theoretical beta spectrum of the thermal fission fragments of 235U in secular equilibrium was calculated using recent fission yields, nuclear decay scheme data, and very recent semi-empirical mass formulas to predict beta Q values of nuclides with unknown energy level structure. Better agreement with experiment is achieved when these isotopes are assumed to contain all of the excited states of isotopes with known decay schemes with the same atomic number Z and with neutron numbers N differing by even integers. The beta branching ratios for the unknown isotopes were assumed to be the renormalized collection of branching ratios found in all known isotopes of the families described above. The results obtained with these narrower restrictions are in better general agreement with experiment than those that replace the excited states and branching ratios of the unknown nuclides with those obtained by taking broad averages over known isotopes. There still appears to be some disagreement between theory and experiment, particularly at the high-energy end of the spectrum.