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2026 Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
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Investing in what comes next
Hash Hashemian
The 2026 ANS Annual Conference, “Net Out and Power Up,” brought the nuclear community together in Denver at the end of May. Over four days at the Sheraton Denver, we heard from exceptional speakers on the most consequential questions facing our field; how fusion and fission can complement each other, how to meet surging electricity demand, and what it takes to sustain American nuclear leadership. The embedded topicals on nuclear fuels and materials and on fusion energy added real technical depth. It was exactly the kind of gathering that reminds us why this community is so remarkable.
That energy and commitment is precisely what I want to channel as I close out my term as president of the American Nuclear Society. Because sustaining it year after year, conference after conference, requires more than enthusiasm. It requires investment.
Deokjung Lee, Joel Rhodes, Kord Smith
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 174 | Number 1 | May 2013 | Pages 79-86
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE12-20
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The huge absorption cross sections of 155Gd and 157Gd cause strong spatial shielding effects in Gd-bearing pins. A high-order depletion method has been developed for CASMO-5 to address the issue of the small depletion steps typically required for Gd-bearing fuel assemblies. In this method, the microscopic absorption reaction rates of gadolinium isotopes are assumed to be quadratic functions of the number density of 155Gd rather than the constant reaction rate assumption in the conventional predictor-corrector (PC) method. This quadratic function assumption models the variations of the spatial shielding effects over the depletion step and therefore improves the accuracy of depletion calculations with a negligible amount of calculation time increase. With this new method, a depletion step size four times larger than the step size used in a conventional PC method can be used for Gd-bearing assemblies without compromising accuracy.