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Division Spotlight
Accelerator Applications
The division was organized to promote the advancement of knowledge of the use of particle accelerator technologies for nuclear and other applications. It focuses on production of neutrons and other particles, utilization of these particles for scientific or industrial purposes, such as the production or destruction of radionuclides significant to energy, medicine, defense or other endeavors, as well as imaging and diagnostics.
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!
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Latest News
Can hydrogen be the transportation fuel in an otherwise nuclear economy?
Let’s face it: The global economy should be powered primarily by nuclear power. And it probably will by the end of this century, with a still-significant assist from renewables and hydro. Once nuclear systems are dominant, the costs come down to where gas is now; and when carbon emissions are reduced to a small portion of their present state, it will become obvious that most other sources are only good in niche settings. I mean, why use small modular reactors to load-follow when they can just produce that power instead of buffering it?
Keith C. Bledsoe, Jeffrey A. Favorite, Tunc Aldemir
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 169 | Number 2 | October 2011 | Pages 208-221
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE10-28
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The differential evolution method, a powerful stochastic optimization algorithm that mimics the process of evolution in nature, is applied to inverse transport problems with several unknown parameters of mixed types, including interface location identification, source composition identification, and material mass density identification, in spherical and cylindrical radioactive source/shield systems. In spherical systems, measurements of leakages of discrete gamma-ray lines are assumed, while in cylindrical systems, measurements of scalar fluxes of discrete lines at points outside the system are assumed. The performance of the differential evolution algorithm is compared to the Levenberg-Marquardt method, a standard gradient-based technique, and the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy, another stochastic technique, on a variety of numerical test problems with several (i.e., three or more) unknown parameters. Numerical results indicate that differential evolution is the most adept method for finding the global optimum for these problems. In spherical geometry, differential evolution implemented serially is run-time competitive with gradient-based methods, while a parallel version of differential evolution would be run-time competitive with gradient-based techniques in cylindrical geometry. A hybrid differential evolution/Levenberg-Marquardt method is also introduced, and numerical results indicate that it can be a fast and robust optimizer for inverse transport problems.