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Division Spotlight
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
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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Argonne to investigate Pu chemistry to aid Hanford cleanup
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory are investigating the details of plutonium chemistry with the goal of aiding the cleanup of the Hanford Site in Washington state. For more than 40 years, reactors located at Hanford produced plutonium for America’s defense program, resulting in millions of gallons of liquid radioactive and chemical waste.
E. C. Gomes, J. P. Duarte, P. F. Frutuoso e Melo
Nuclear Technology | Volume 194 | Number 1 | April 2016 | Pages 73-96
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NT15-29
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The purpose of this paper is to highlight and model the most important steps in cases of human failure in radiotherapy (teletherapy and brachytherapy) procedures by identifying possible modes of human failure. An approach via Bayesian networks (BNs) to model and highlight the most relevant steps of teletherapy and brachytherapy was used. Finally, as a technique for the quantification of BNs, an expert opinion elicitation procedure was used since no database is available.
In the case of teletherapy, observing only the stages of prescription, planning, and execution, it appears that the step that most increases the success probability, after consideration of preventive measures, is execution. This is in agreement with cases of errors and accidents reported in the literature, considering that more than 50% of these cases are related to the implementation phase. Related to brachytherapy, the most relevant factor was the use of equipment, whose increase in success probability after consideration of preventive measures was 17.2%, demonstrating the importance of a continuous specific training.
It is important to mention that the purpose of this study was not to calculate the risk associated with radiotherapy treatments but rather to check how accident prevention influences the success procedure and observe the relationship among all stages. An uncertainty analysis was performed of the expert data by considering that data scattering followed a normal or a lognormal distribution, due to data ranges considered. This analysis revealed that data scattering was better represented by normal distributions, and the results are consistent with pointwise estimates initially made.