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Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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Glass strategy: Hanford’s enhanced waste glass program
The mission of the Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection (ORP) is to complete the safe cleanup of waste resulting from decades of nuclear weapons development. One of the most technologically challenging responsibilities is the safe disposition of approximately 56 million gallons of radioactive waste historically stored in 177 tanks at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
ORP has a clear incentive to reduce the overall mission duration and cost. One pathway is to develop and deploy innovative technical solutions that can advance baseline flow sheets toward higher efficiency operations while reducing identified risks without compromising safety. Vitrification is the baseline process that will convert both high-level and low-level radioactive waste at Hanford into a stable glass waste form for long-term storage and disposal.
Although vitrification is a mature technology, there are key areas where technology can further reduce operational risks, advance baseline processes to maximize waste throughput, and provide the underpinning to enhance operational flexibility; all steps in reducing mission duration and cost.
Guillaume Giudicelli, Kord Smith, Benoit Forget
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 194 | Number 11 | November 2020 | Pages 1044-1055
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1765606
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A recent hybrid stochastic-deterministic calculation scheme using Monte Carlo–tallied group cross sections in a deterministic solver uses the best of both worlds for accurate and fast reactor agnostic transport simulations. However, neglecting the angular dependence of group cross sections induces large self-shielding errors in resonance groups, causing a large reactivity bias up to 300 pcm in light water reactors. To recover this error, we introduce a two-scale assembly transport calculation scheme: cross sections are tallied at the assembly level, while equivalence parameters are computed in a two-dimensional (2-D) pin cell system. We validate a novel equivalence method based on jump conditions on angular fluxes by comparing to the well-established superhomogenization method for 2-D and three-dimensional (3-D) linear source method of characteristics calculations. Test cases include 2-D and 3-D assemblies of two different enrichments with homogeneous and discretized cross-section discretizations. The linear source approximation enables using coarse source-region discretization for these hot zero-power problems. Both equivalence techniques perform similarly, recover the reactivity bias, and achieve near preservation of reaction rates, supporting this multiscale approach to equivalence.