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Division Spotlight
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
Meeting Spotlight
2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
AI and productivity growth
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
This month’s issue of Nuclear News focuses on supply and demand. The “supply” part of the story highlights nuclear’s continued success in providing electricity to the grid more than 90 percent of the time, while the “demand” part explores the seemingly insatiable appetite of hyperscale data centers for steady, carbon-free energy.
Technically, we are in the second year of our AI epiphany, the collective realization that Big Tech’s energy demands are so large that they cannot be met without a historic build-out of new generation capacity. Yet the enormity of it all still seems hard to grasp.
or the better part of two decades, U.S. electricity demand has been flat. Sure, we’ve seen annual fluctuations that correlate with weather patterns and the overall domestic economic performance, but the gigawatt-hours of electricity America consumed in 2021 are almost identical to our 2007 numbers.
Edward D. Arthur
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 20 | Number 4 | December 1991 | Pages 641-647
Accelerator/Reactor Waste Transmutation | doi.org/10.13182/FST91-A11946912
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new concept for an accelerator-driven transmutation system is described. The central feature of the concept is generation of intense fluxes of thermal neutrons. In the system all long-lived radionuclides comprising high-level nuclear waste can be transmuted efficiently. Transmutation takes place in a unique, low material inventory environment. Presently two principal areas are being investigated for application of the concept. The first is associated with cleanup of defense high-level waste at DOE sites such as Hanford. The second, longer term area involves production of electric power using a coupled accelerator-multiplying blanket system. This system would utilize natural thorium or uranium and would transmute long-lived components of high-level waste concurrently during operation.