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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
2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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
Countering the nuclear workforce shortage narrative
James Chamberlain, director of the Nuclear, Utilities, and Energy Sector at Rullion, has declared that the nuclear industry will not have workforce challenges going forward. “It’s time to challenge the scarcity narrative,” he wrote in a recent online article. “Nuclear isn't short of talent; it’s short of imagination in how it attracts, trains, and supports the workforce of the future.”
Henry Makowitz, James R. Powell, Richard Wiswall
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 78 | Number 4 | August 1981 | Pages 395-404
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE81-A21374
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new concept for the transmutation of fission products and transuranics is studied. This concept, termed HYPERFUSE, allows one inertial reactor to transmute objectionable fission products (137Cs and 90Sr) from a large number (e.g., ∼30) of light water fission reactors, while at the same time generating electric power from the HYPERFUSE plant at a reasonable net plant efficiency (e.g., ∼30%). The cost of transmutation should be relatively low compared to other fission waste transmutation concepts due to the high support rate (number of fission reactors per HYPERFUSE reactor) and the effective generation of power by the HYPERFUSE reactor. Although the HYPERFUSE concept offers the possibility of a very effective means for waste transmutation and significant reductions in both high-integrity waste storage (burial) time and long-term risk potential, hazards will be introduced by such a system due to chemical processing and handling of radioactive materials in the recovery, partitioning, and fabrication stages as well as process and accidental losses. Such process risks need to be quantified for both conventional and advanced, chemical, and isotopic separation methods in order to evaluate the overall advantages and disadvantages of such a system. A system such as HYPERFUSE, however, leads to a quantifiable set of near-term risks for the nuclear waste problem, and a possibility of the elimination of a need for long-term nuclear waste disposal over a time scale of 106 years.