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Decommissioning & Environmental Sciences
The mission of the Decommissioning and Environmental Sciences (DES) Division is to promote the development and use of those skills and technologies associated with the use of nuclear energy and the optimal management and stewardship of the environment, sustainable development, decommissioning, remediation, reutilization, and long-term surveillance and maintenance of nuclear-related installations, and sites. The target audience for this effort is the membership of the Division, the Society, and the public at large.
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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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Latest News
Commercial nuclear innovation "new space" age
In early 2006, a start-up company launched a small rocket from a tiny island in the Pacific. It exploded, showering the island with debris. A year later, a second launch attempt sent a rocket to space but failed to make orbit, burning up in the atmosphere. Another year brought a third attempt—and a third failure. The following month, in September 2008, the company used the last of its funds to launch a fourth rocket. It reached orbit, making history as the first privately funded liquid-fueled rocket to do so.
Cheol Ho Pyeon, Masao Yamanaka, Tadafumi Sano, Koichi Takamiya
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 193 | Number 9 | September 2019 | Pages 1023-1032
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2019.1603014
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
At the Kyoto University Critical Assembly (KUCA), critical irradiation experiments on 237Np and 241Am foils are carried out in the neutron hard spectrum core. For nuclear transmutation of minor actinides, special attention is paid to determining 237Np and 241Am fission reaction rates and to 237Np capture reaction rates in the KUCA hard spectrum core. In the back-to-back (BTB) fission chamber, two nuclide foils (test: 237Np or 241Am; reference: 235U) are set closely to each other to measure the aforementioned fission reaction rates. Interestingly, the experimental 237Np and 241Am fission and capture reaction rates are attained by critical irradiation at low W reactor power for 1 h in the core and are successfully deduced through signals from the BTB fission chamber (fission) and the gamma-ray detection (capture) after the irradiation, respectively, together with MCNP calculations.