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Conference Spotlight
2026 Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
December 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
November 2025
Latest News
Nuclear power’s new rule book: Managing uncertainty in efficiency, safety, and independence
The U.S. nuclear industry is standing at its most volatile regulatory moment yet—one that will shape the trajectory and the safety of the industry for decades to come. Recent judicial, legislative, and executive actions are rewriting the rules governing the licensing and regulation of nuclear power reactors. Although these changes are intended to promote and accelerate the deployment of new nuclear energy technologies, the collision of multiple legal shifts—occurring simultaneously and intersecting with profound technological uncertainties—is overwhelming the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and threatening to destabilize investor and industry expectations.
Technical Session|Panel|Panels
Tuesday, April 23, 2024|1:30–3:15PM PDT|Imperial Ballroom
Session Chair:
Catherine M. Percher
Alternate Chair:
Mark D. DeHart
Session Organizer:
Christopher M. Perfetti
Validation plays a vital role in building trust in the predictive power of models and computational methods. Validation of a code consists of modeling documented real-world experiments and comparing the code-predicted response to the actual, measured response. In this panel session, we will discuss how these experiments are evaluated as benchmarks and used for validation of nuclear data and computational methods. We will also present an overview of four benchmark projects that aim to document different kinds of real-world experiments, with four panelists who chair the projects: Catherine Percher (LLNL), chair of the International Criticality Safety Benchmark Evaluation Project (ICSBEP), Mark DeHart (INL), chair of the International Reactor Physics Experiment Evaluation Project (IRPhEP), Thomas Miller (ORNL), chair of the Shielding Integral Benchmark and Database (SINBAD), and Germina Ilas (ORNL), chair of the Spent Fuel Composition (SFCompo) project. Additionally, Rowdy Davis (UNM), will present on his experience being a benchmark evaluator for ICSBEP, having recently submitted a benchmark on the University of New Mexico research reactor.
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