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Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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Going Nuclear: Notes from the officially unofficial book tour
I work in the analytical labs at one of Europe’s oldest and largest nuclear sites: Sellafield, in northwestern England. I spend my days at the fume hood front, pipette in one hand and radiation probe in the other (and dosimeter pinned to my chest, of course). Outside the lab, I have a second job: I moonlight as a writer and public speaker. My new popular science book—Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World—came out last summer, and it feels like my life has been running at full power ever since.
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.
Mark DeHart
INL
Germina Ilas
ORNL
Thomas Miller
Rowdy Davis
UNM
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