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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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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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BREAKING NEWS: Trump issues executive orders to overhaul nuclear industry
The Trump administration issued four executive orders today aimed at boosting domestic nuclear deployment ahead of significant growth in projected energy demand in the coming decades.
During a live signing in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump called nuclear “a hot industry,” adding, “It’s a brilliant industry. [But] you’ve got to do it right. It’s become very safe and environmental.”
Stanley E. Turner, Marva K. Gurley
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 80 | Number 2 | February 1982 | Pages 230-237
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE82-A21427
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The AMPX-KENO computer code package is commonly used to evaluate criticality in high-density spent fuel storage rack designs. Consequently, it is important to know the reliability that can be placed on such calculations and whether or not the results are conservative. Recent critical experiments by the Babcock & Wilcox Company (B&W) provide data on configurations with thin absorbers containing boron that are more nearly representative of poisoned spent fuel storage rack designs than were earlier critical experiments. A series of AMPX-KENO calculations has been made on selected critical experiments and the results compared with similar analyses reported in the literature by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and B&W. Within the normal statistical variation of KENO calculations, results confirm that there is no apparent difference in the versions of AMPX-KENO and the 123-group GAM-THERMOS libraries used at three different computer installations. Evaluation of the calculational results provides evidence for a statistically significant trend toward overprediction of reactivity with increasing reactivity worth of thin plates of boron-containing material. Similarly, statistical analyses reveal a trend toward underprediction of reactivity with increasing water-gap spacing between fuel assemblies. For most realistic spent fuel storage rack designs including neutron absorbers, these results imply that AMPX-KENO calculations are conservative and could possibly overpredict reactivity by as much as 2 to 5% Δk, based on a linear extrapolation of observed trends. Statistical analyses in support of these contentions are provided, and additional critical experiments with boron absorbers of higher reactivity worth are recommended.