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The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
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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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Remembering Charles E. Till
Charles E. Till
Charles E. Till, an ANS member since 1963 and Fellow since 1987, passed away on March 22 at the age of 89. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Saskatchewan and a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from Imperial College, University of London. Till initially worked for the Civilian Atomic Power Department of the Canadian General Electric Company, where he was the physicist in charge of the startup of the first prototype CANDU reactor in Canada.
Till joined Argonne National Laboratory in 1963 in the Applied Physics Division, where he worked as an experimentalist in the Fast Critical Experiments program. He then moved to additional positions of increasing responsibility, becoming division director in 1973. Under his leadership, the Applied Physics Division established itself as one of the elite reactor physics organizations in the world. Both the experimental (critical experiments and nuclear data measurements) and nuclear analysis methods work were internationally recognized. Till led Argonne’s participation in the International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Evaluation (INFCE), and he was the lead U.S. delegate to INFCE Working Group 5, Fast Breeders.
I. J. Thompson, Y. M. X. M. Dardenne, J. M. Kenneally, A. Robertson, L. E. Ahle, C. A. Hagmann, R. A. Henderson, D. Vogt, C.-Y. Wu, W. Younes
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 171 | Number 2 | June 2012 | Pages 85-135
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE10-101
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Because of the importance of accurate data for fission chain yields (FCYs) for many applications, we present a rigorous “clean sheet” evaluation of all available data to provide an accurate set of pertinent FCYs. Because some nuclear data (e.g., half-lives, branching ratios, etc.) have been refined since the original analyses, where possible we update the data and their associated uncertainties. This evaluation is particularly topical since there are differences in the nuclear data used by radiochemists at different laboratories internationally and since some experiments from the 1970s have been recently reexamined with details published for the first time.The focus of this work is the production of a small set of fission products (95Zr, 99Mo, 144Ce, 147Nd) from plutonium irradiated by fission spectrum neutrons. Because 147Nd is a common isotope used at several laboratories, its production rate is examined critically. We find that most of the interlaboratory discrepancies can be explained by a dependence of its yield on the energy of the neutron causing fission, so we consider in detail the statistical significance of this claim. The potential for neutron energy dependence of 147Nd production from plutonium was first recognized in 1977 by Maeck and recently raised again as a possibility by Chadwick. The data for 95Zr, by contrast, demonstrate no statistically significant energy-dependence trends, but the data at the higher energies demonstrate significant scatter.With the relatively small number of data points, and recognizing that measurement methods and technologies have likely significantly improved in the nearly 30 years since the last measurement, additional measurements to refine the assessment and improve the uncertainties may be warranted.