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
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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.
J. Maisonneuve, T. Oda, S. Tanaka
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 4 | November 2011 | Pages 1507-1510
Interaction with Materials | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12718
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The stability of hydrogen atoms trapped in vacancy clusters of a bcc iron structure is investigated by molecular statics calculations of the hydrogen binding energy to these clusters. The configurations having a minimum potential energy are obtained from the relaxation of a large number of different initial atomic configurations. Calculations of hydrogen binding energy to a mono-vacancy illustrate a relatively large gain of energy in trapping up to two hydrogen atoms in a monovacancy and the increasing difficulty to trap additional atoms due to hydrogen mutual repulsion. Comparison with ab-initio reference calculations of the hydrogen binding energy shows good agreement for up to three trapped hydrogen atoms. Based on the calculations conducted on the most stable vacancy-hydrogen complexes containing two to six vacancies, the maximum capacity of hydrogen atoms per vacancy was found to decrease with the size of vacancy cluster. The calculations of hydrogen binding energies to these clusters show that trapping two hydrogen atoms per vacancy is still a particularly favorable process for vacancy clusters.