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Division Spotlight
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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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Latest News
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.
Micheal A. Smith, Richard M. Lell, Gerardo Aliberti, Zhaopeng Zhong, Florent Heidet
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 196 | Number 1 | October 2022 | Pages S71-S82
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2058845
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Versatile Test Reactor (VTR) that is being designed today is heavily reliant upon the Argonne Reactor Codes (ARC) modeling software for predicting the operational performance of the VTR. Given its usage in the VTR, a set of validation cases appropriate for the VTR must be assembled. The measurements taken in ZPPR-15, Experimental Breeder Reactor II (EBR-II), and Fast Flux Test Facility were chosen and analyzed with the ARC software as part of creating the necessary validation basis. The results of the ARC software on the measured data are discussed here, and they demonstrate the accuracy of the ARC software on fast spectrum reactors.
