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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Latest News
No impact from Savannah River radioactive wasps
The news is abuzz with recent news stories about four radioactive wasp nests found at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The site has been undergoing cleanup operations since the 1990s related to the production of plutonium and tritium for defense purposes during the Cold War. Cleanup activities are expected to continue into the 2060s.
Gordon E. Hansen, Ronald G. Palmer
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 103 | Number 3 | November 1989 | Pages 237-246
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE89-A23674
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Critical experiments have been performed on a mock-up of the compact nuclear power source (CNPS), a small reactor system designed to provide power at sites where fuel costs and logistics make fossil-fuel-powered systems less attractive. Although the program has been canceled, its unique physics characteristics make the CNPS a useful benchmark for medium-enriched uranium-graphite-moderated reactors. The physical design, details of the critical experiments, and the methods and results of the analysis are described. The discrepancies between calculations and experiments are such that, though further modeling work is necessary to delineate the causes, the beginning-of-life performance of the reactor was adequately predicted.