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Division Spotlight
Young Members Group
The Young Members Group works to encourage and enable all young professional members to be actively involved in the efforts and endeavors of the Society at all levels (Professional Divisions, ANS Governance, Local Sections, etc.) as they transition from the role of a student to the role of a professional. It sponsors non-technical workshops and meetings that provide professional development and networking opportunities for young professionals, collaborates with other Divisions and Groups in developing technical and non-technical content for topical and national meetings, encourages its members to participate in the activities of the Groups and Divisions that are closely related to their professional interests as well as in their local sections, introduces young members to the rules and governance structure of the Society, and nominates young professionals for awards and leadership opportunities available to members.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Winter Conference and Expo
November 17–21, 2024
Orlando, FL|Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld
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!
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Latest News
Tank waste operations resume at Idaho’s IWTU
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced yesterday that waste processing operations have resumed at the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU) at the Idaho National Laboratory Site. The resumption of operations follows the completion of two maintenance campaigns at the radioactive liquid waste treatment facility.
Kenneth D. Jarman, Erin A. Miller, Richard S. Wittman, Christopher J. Gesh
Nuclear Technology | Volume 175 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 326-334
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the 16th Biennial Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division / Radiation Measurements and General Instrumentation | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-72
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Locating illicit radiological sources using gamma-ray or neutron detection is a key challenge for both homeland security and nuclear nonproliferation. Localization methods using an array of detectors or a sequence of observations in time and space must provide rapid results while accounting for a dynamic attenuating environment. In the presence of significant attenuation and scatter, more extensive numerical transport calculations in place of the standard analytical approximations may be required to achieve accurate results. Numerical adjoints based on deterministic transport codes provide relatively efficient detector response calculations needed to determine the most likely location of a true source given a set of observed count rates. Probabilistic representations account for uncertainty in the source location resulting from uncertainties in detector responses and the potential for nonunique solutions. A Bayesian approach improves on previous likelihood methods for source localization by allowing the incorporation of all available information to help constrain solutions.We present an approach to localizing radiological sources that uses numerical adjoints and a Bayesian formulation and demonstrate the approach on two simple example scenarios. Results indicate accurate estimates of source locations. We briefly study the effect of neglecting the contribution of all scattered radiation in the adjoints, as analytical transport approximations do, for a case with moderately attenuating material between detectors and sources. The source location accuracy of the uncollided-only solutions appears to be significantly worse at the source strength considered here, suggesting that the higher physical fidelity that is provided by full numerical adjoint-based solutions may provide an advantage in operational settings.