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
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
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.
T. K. Gray, D. L. Youchison, R. E. Ellis, M. A. Jaworski, A. Khodak, T. Looby, M. L. Reinke, G. Smalley, D. E. Wolfe
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 77 | Number 1 | January 2021 | Pages 9-18
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1831872
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
As part of the recovery project of the National Spherical Tokamak Experiment–Upgrade (NSTX-U), the divertor plasma-facing components (PFCs) were redesigned to handle significantly higher heat fluxes and longer pulse lengths than NSTX. The design process resulted in a castellated, graphite PFC tile. To verify the thermal performance of this design, dedicated electron beam, high heat flux (HHF) testing was carried out on a de-optimized mock-up PFC target. These tests demonstrated that the tile design is itself robust to large, localized thermal gradients. No mechanical damage to the mock-up was observed during HHF testing, though the actual PFC tile mechanical tie-down was not tested. Rather, when the surface temperature exceeded the sublimation temperature of graphite, carbon blooms from the mock-up tile surface were observed. This resulted in 1 to 2 mm of surface material ablating from the mock-up after repeated, highly localized electron beam exposures.