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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
2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott 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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2025
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Latest News
AI and productivity growth
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
This month’s issue of Nuclear News focuses on supply and demand. The “supply” part of the story highlights nuclear’s continued success in providing electricity to the grid more than 90 percent of the time, while the “demand” part explores the seemingly insatiable appetite of hyperscale data centers for steady, carbon-free energy.
Technically, we are in the second year of our AI epiphany, the collective realization that Big Tech’s energy demands are so large that they cannot be met without a historic build-out of new generation capacity. Yet the enormity of it all still seems hard to grasp.
or the better part of two decades, U.S. electricity demand has been flat. Sure, we’ve seen annual fluctuations that correlate with weather patterns and the overall domestic economic performance, but the gigawatt-hours of electricity America consumed in 2021 are almost identical to our 2007 numbers.
Mónica Chillarón, Antoni Vidal-Ferràndiz, Vicente Vidal, Gumersindo Verdú
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 1 | April 2025 | Pages S606-S616
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2024.2357395
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
With the aging of the nuclear reactor fleet in Europe, and especially in Spain, monitoring these reactors through complex models has become of great interest to maintain the safety and operational capability of these nuclear power plants. It is of particular interest to locate the place where a possible anomaly has occurred, as well as the type, to guarantee the safety of the reactor through the analysis of neutron flux fluctuations. Therefore, we propose a deep learning framework for the deconvolution of reactor transfer functions from perturbation-induced neutron noise sources. The main objective of this work is to develop tools based on deep learning techniques to classify the type and to locate the perturbation, working with simulated data with different noise levels, and to study the number of detectors that need to be active. In particular, the data used have been simulated for the BIBLIS 2D reactor using FEMFFUSION. This work has been carried out using the Keras library based on tensor flow, managing to develop two convolutional neural networks that adapt well to the data model. High-accuracy results are obtained both when predicting the type of the perturbation and when locating the place of the perturbation, with a low error rate even when only four to eight detectors are available.