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Division Spotlight
Isotopes & Radiation
Members are devoted to applying nuclear science and engineering technologies involving isotopes, radiation applications, and associated equipment in scientific research, development, and industrial processes. Their interests lie primarily in education, industrial uses, biology, medicine, and health physics. Division committees include Analytical Applications of Isotopes and Radiation, Biology and Medicine, Radiation Applications, Radiation Sources and Detection, and Thermal Power Sources.
Meeting Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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
Supreme Court rules against Texas in interim storage case
The Supreme Court voted 6–3 against Texas and a group of landowners today in a case involving the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s licensing of a consolidated interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel, reversing a decision by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to grant the state and landowners Fasken Land and Minerals (Fasken) standing to challenge the license.
M. D. Tucker, D. R. Novog
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 7 | July 2023 | Pages 1305-1330
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2160612
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A subset of pressurized water reactor (PWR) studies from Exercise II-2 of the Uncertainty Analysis in Modeling for Light Water Reactors (UAM-LWR) benchmark study has been performed to quantify the importance of both nuclear data uncertainties and manufacturing uncertainties in an assembly depletion calculation and a mini-core rod movement transient. The depletion study of the 15 × 15 PWR assembly using the SAMPLER and TRITON modules of the SCALE code system revealed a maximum uncertainty in keff of 0.49% for fresh fuel, decreasing to 0.38% at the midpoint of the fuel cycle and rising back to 0.48% at the end of the fuel cycle. Uncertainties and correlations of various homogenized cross sections and other group constant data, such as keff, have been determined, and the effect of randomly applied manufacturing uncertainties was found to be largely negligible relative to nuclear data uncertainties for bulk lattice parameters. However, for local parameters, such as the pin power factors, assembly discontinuity factors, and diffusion coefficients, the effects from manufacturing uncertainties were appreciable and sometimes dominant.
Nuclear data uncertainties were found to be the dominant contributors to uncertainty in the isotopic composition of the overall assembly, with the exception of very early in the fuel cycle, where manufacturing uncertainties such as perturbations to the fuel density and pin radius made nonnegligible contributions to total uncertainty. The contribution of manufacturing uncertainties to isotopic uncertainties was nonnegligible at a pin-by-pin level, but still smaller than the contributions from nuclear data uncertainty. Studies of the PWR mini-core rod movement transient using homogenized data from the SCALE models in the PARCS diffusion code showed little difference between the tested modeling approaches and demonstrated that nuclear data uncertainties dominated the manufacturing uncertainties in the global figures of merit considered, such as the equilibrium core boron concentration, the maximum core power factor, and the maximum reactivity insertion. For local effects, such as maximum pin power during the transient, the randomly applied manufacturing uncertainties were dominant. It was found in general that for global system properties, nuclear data uncertainties made significantly larger contributions to total uncertainty, whereas for local parameters the impact of manufacturing uncertainties was at least nonnegligible, and for some parameters, dominant.