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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
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
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
TerraPower begins U.K. regulatory approval process
Seattle-based TerraPower signaled its interest this week in building its Natrium small modular reactor in the United Kingdom, the company announced.
TerraPower sent a letter to the U.K.’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, formally establishing its intention to enter the U.K. generic design assessment (GDA) process. This is TerraPower’s first step in deployment of its Natrium technology—a 345-MW sodium fast reactor coupled with a molten salt energy storage unit—on the international stage.
Edward Goodell, Glenn Sjoden, Reid Porter, Luther McDonald IV, Kari Sentz
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 198 | Number 11 | November 2024 | Pages 2069-2079
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2287802
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Nuclear forensics relies on different signatures to identify the source of nuclear material. Such signatures include crystalline structure, chemical composition, and particle morphology. One way to quantify morphology in electron microscope imagery is through image segmentation, where pixels are assigned to several partitions (or groups) that correspond to particles, grains, and other objects of interest within the image. Once pixels are assigned to segments, it is relatively straightforward to quantify other quantities of interest, such as grain size, circularity, etc. However, the range and diversity of microscope images make it difficult to obtain an accurate segmentation automatically. The accuracy of segmentation can be improved through supervised learning, but this requires many images to be manually segmented. Another way to improve the accuracy is to use interactive segmentation. Interactive segmentation requires a human to provide image-specific user input to improve performance. However, the amount of user input (effort) is generally far less than is required for supervised learning. In this paper, we investigate several parallelization strategies to automatically explore the user input parameter space of interactive segmentation algorithms across a large number of images. Specifically, we investigate four different parallelization mechanisms in a high-performance computing (HPC) environment and use the Amdahl fraction to evaluate efficiency on multiple processor cores across multiple nodes. Ultimately, the parallelization strategy that was most efficient utilized the message passing interface integrated with the segmentation and quantification code. This strategy had an Amdahl fraction of 0.985 and a performance of about 0.251 s/image. These results indicate that the parameter space of interactive segmentation algorithms can be efficiently explored using HPC. This opens the door to future work where user input is reduced and where interactive image segmentation algorithms are automatically applied to large image sets.