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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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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ANS joins others in seeking to discuss SNF/HLW impasse
The American Nuclear Society joined seven other organizations to send a letter to Energy Secretary Christopher Wright on July 8, asking to meet with him to discuss “the restoration of a highly functioning program to meet DOE’s legal responsibility to manage and dispose of the nation’s commercial and legacy defense spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and high-level radioactive waste (HLW).”
Mathew W. Swinney, Douglas E. Peplow, Bruce W. Patton, Andrew D. Nicholson, Daniel E. Archer, Michael J. Willis
Nuclear Technology | Volume 203 | Number 3 | September 2018 | Pages 325-335
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1458558
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The detection of radioactive sources in an urban setting is greatly complicated by natural background radiation, which emanates from various materials including roadways, sidewalks, soil, and building exteriors. The method presented and demonstrated here represents an effort to characterize the concentration of naturally occurring radioactive material (NORM) in these types of materials. The location surveyed in this work was the Fort Indiantown Gap Combined Arms Collective Training Facility in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania. Over 70 measurements with a high-purity germanium detector were performed to ascertain the NORM concentrations present in the soil, asphalt, gravel, concrete, and walls found throughout the site. Monte Carlo radiation transport calculations were used to obtain detector responses for these various geometries and materials to convert these measurements into NORM concentration estimates. Finally, synthetic spectra were simulated using the predicted source terms and compared to actual measurements, showing acceptable agreement.