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Decommissioning & Environmental Sciences
The mission of the Decommissioning and Environmental Sciences (DES) Division is to promote the development and use of those skills and technologies associated with the use of nuclear energy and the optimal management and stewardship of the environment, sustainable development, decommissioning, remediation, reutilization, and long-term surveillance and maintenance of nuclear-related installations, and sites. The target audience for this effort is the membership of the Division, the Society, and the public at large.
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ANS Student Conference 2025
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Latest News
First astatine-labeled compound shipped in the U.S.
The Department of Energy’s National Isotope Development Center (NIDC) on March 31 announced the successful long-distance shipment in the United States of a biologically active compound labeled with the medical radioisotope astatine-211 (At-211). Because previous shipments have included only the “bare” isotope, the NIDC has described the development as “unleashing medical innovation.”
Nicholas W. Touran, John C. Lee
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 179 | Number 1 | January 2015 | Pages 85-103
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE13-85
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We developed a simulation tool that accelerates the evaluation of design changes on the equilibrium cycle of fast-spectrum nuclear reactors. Within the tool, an implicit equilibrium cycle search is accelerated by a modal expansion perturbation method that expands arbitrary flux perturbations on a large basis of λ-eigenmode harmonics. The harmonics are computed only at the reference state using Krylov subspace iterative methods, and substantial perturbations from this state are shown to be well approximated by computationally efficient algebraic expressions. The modal expansion method is coupled to the equilibrium method to produce the later-in-time response of each design perturbation, resulting in an explicit perturbation-accelerated equilibrium cycle method. Because the method determines the perturbed flux explicitly, a wide variety of core performance metrics may be tracked within optimization frameworks, including the performance of thermal hydraulics, fuel, economics, core mechanical, and transients. This capability strongly differentiates the method from traditional generalized perturbation theory approaches. The motivating end-use of the method is to evaluate objective functions in multidisciplinary optimization of advanced reactor designs, though many other applications are envisioned.