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.
Division Spotlight
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.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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
X-energy receives federal tax credit for TRISO fuel facility
Advanced reactor company X-energy has been awarded $148.5 million in tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act for construction of its TRISO-X fuel fabrication facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
Kevin Skinner, Greg Housley, Colleen Shelton-Davis
Nuclear Technology | Volume 176 | Number 2 | November 2011 | Pages 296-308
Technical Paper | Radioactive Waste Management and Disposal | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A13304
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Was the death of the Yucca Mountain repository the fate of a technical lemon or a political lemon? We must be careful not to let this debate lure us away from capitalizing on the fruits of the project. One such fruit is a system for safely sealing packages containing radioactive nuclear waste. In March 2009, Idaho National Laboratory (INL) successfully demonstrated the Waste Package Closure System (WPCS), a full-scale prototype system for closing waste packages (WPs) that were to be entombed in the now-abandoned Yucca Mountain repository. This paper describes the system and components, which INL designed and built, to weld the closure lids on the WPs, nondestructively examine the welds using four different techniques, repair the welds if necessary, mitigate crack-initiating stresses in the surfaces of the welds, evacuate and backfill the WPs with an inert gas, and perform all of these tasks remotely. As a nation, we now have a proven method for securely sealing nuclear WPs for long-term storage - regardless of whether the future destination for these WPs will be an underground repository. Additionally, many of the WPCS's features and concepts may benefit other remote nuclear applications.