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
Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy
The mission of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy Division (NNPD) is to promote the peaceful use of nuclear technology while simultaneously preventing the diversion and misuse of nuclear material and technology through appropriate safeguards and security, and promotion of nuclear nonproliferation policies. To achieve this mission, the objectives of the NNPD are to: Promote policy that discourages the proliferation of nuclear technology and material to inappropriate entities. Provide information to ANS members, the technical community at large, opinion leaders, and decision makers to improve their understanding of nuclear nonproliferation issues. Become a recognized technical resource on nuclear nonproliferation, safeguards, and security issues. Serve as the integration and coordination body for nuclear nonproliferation activities for the ANS. Work cooperatively with other ANS divisions to achieve these objective nonproliferation policies.
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2024
Jan 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
May 2024
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
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.
Iraci Martinez Gonçalves, Daniel K. S. Ting, Paulo Brasko Ferreira, Belle R. Upadhyaya
Nuclear Technology | Volume 149 | Number 1 | January 2005 | Pages 101-109
Technical Paper | Nuclear Plant Operations and Control | doi.org/10.13182/NT05-A3582
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents a reactor-monitoring algorithm using the group method of data handling (GMDH) that creates nonlinear algebraic models for system characterization. The monitoring system was applied to the IEA-R1 experimental reactor at the Instituto de Pesquisas Energéticas e Nucleares (IPEN). The IEA-R1 is a 5-MW pool-type research reactor that uses light water as coolant and moderator and graphite as reflector. The GMDH provides a general framework for characterizing the relationships among a set of state variables of a process system and is used for generating estimates of critical variables in an optimal data-driven model form. The monitoring system developed in this work was used to predict the IEA-R1 reactor environment, using nuclear power, rod position, and coolant temperatures, by combining two variables at a time. The results obtained using the GMDH models agreed very well with the dose rate measurements, with prediction errors of less than 5%. The error was minimal when the dose rate prediction was made using reactor power and coolant temperature.