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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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International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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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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DOE report: Cost to finish cleaning up Hanford site could exceed $589 billion
The cost to complete the cleanup of the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state could cost as much as $589.4 billion, according to the 2025 Hanford Lifecycle Scope, Schedule, and Cost Report, which was released by the DOE on April 15. While that estimate is $44.2 billion lower than the DOE’s 2022 estimate of $640.6 billion, a separate, low-end estimate has since grown by more than 21 percent, to $364 billion.
The life cycle report, which the DOE is legally required to issue every three years under agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Washington State Department of Ecology (Ecology), summarizes the remaining work scope, schedule, and cost estimates for the nuclear site. For more than 40 years, Hanford’s reactors produced plutonium for America’s defense program.
Harshavardhan Kadvekar, Sana Khan, Sangeetha Prasanna Ram, Jayalekshmi Nair, S. Ganesan
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 183 | Number 3 | July 2016 | Pages 356-370
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE15-103
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In a majority of the cases, error propagation studies in nuclear science and engineering use the sandwich formula, which is strictly applicable when the probability density function of the random input quantities (e.g., the basic cross-section data) are determined completely by the mean and covariances. The use of the sandwich formula, which is also referred to in the literature as traditional first-order sensitivity analysis or adjoint-based sensitivity and uncertainty analysis, requires the assumption of linearity assumption and relatively small errors. For the first time, this paper examines the application of unscented transformation (UT) technique, which is used in control and reliability engineering, to error propagation in the nuclear field for nonlinear cases. Using different examples, this paper shows that this deterministic method of UT produces better results compared to the conventional sandwich formula for error propagation. An example on error propagation given in the literature is revisited, and a calculation of the efficiency of a gamma-ray detector is also presented for illustrative purposes using the UT method.
