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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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PR: American Nuclear Society welcomes Senate confirmation of Ted Garrish as the DOE’s nuclear energy secretary
Washington, D.C. — The American Nuclear Society (ANS) applauds the U.S. Senate's confirmation of Theodore “Ted” Garrish as Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
“On behalf of over 11,000 professionals in the fields of nuclear science and technology, the American Nuclear Society congratulates Mr. Garrish on being confirmed by the Senate to once again lead the DOE Office of Nuclear Energy,” said ANS President H.M. "Hash" Hashemian.
W. Haeck, B. Cochet, L. Aguiar
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 171 | Number 1 | May 2012 | Pages 52-68
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE10-99
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To take the production of isomeric states into account during the irradiation of a material, a depletion code needs the proper isomeric branching ratio s for every isomeric state s produced in a reaction. The composition of some nuclides such as, for example, 238Pu and some Cm isotopes is quite sensitive to the value of the isomeric branching ratio for the 241Am neutron capture reaction. Existing depletion codes use constant burnup-independent values for the isomeric branching ratio data, which were calculated in advance for a particular type of spectrum (e.g., pressurized water reactor, boiling water reactor, or fast reactor systems). In this paper, we propose a burnup-dependent treatment using evaluated nuclear data from ENDF files as a function of the irradiation history. This treatment has been implemented into the VESTA Monte Carlo depletion code using both the multigroup binning approach and Monte Carlo estimators. The validity and usefulness of this new treatment has been demonstrated using experimental data from the MALIBU program and has shown that it improves the prediction of 242mAm when using JEFF 3.1 data. It is also shown that more work is required on the measurement and evaluation of the cross-section data for the Am isotopes in general and the energy-dependent 241Am branching ratio in particular to improve the results of depletion calculations.