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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.
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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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.”
A. Y. K. Chen, T. Yoshida, T. Tanabe
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 150 | Number 3 | July 2005 | Pages 349-356
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE05-A2521
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The authors have proposed a technique using special metal structures to efficiently convert gamma rays to low-energy electrons, with possible applications such as detoxification of water and hydrogen production using gamma rays from radioactive waste. The present study employed the Monte Carlo N-Particle (MCNP) transport code to understand in detail the mechanisms of low-energy photon and electron generation from gamma rays in water vessels containing various metal structures. The study demonstrated that the amount of low-energy electrons in water generally increases with (a) the Z number of the metal, (b) the volume of the metal, (c) the ability of low-energy electrons to escape from the metal and into the water region, (d) the closeness with adjacent metal plates, and (e) the ability of metal plates to reflect high-energy primary photons to delay their exit from the vessel. Based on these basic understandings, more sophisticated structures were designed and compared in computer simulations. The simulation results indicated that closed-type structures, such as a honeycomb tube, can provide better performance in terms of efficiently generating low-energy electrons in water.