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Division Spotlight
Nuclear Installations Safety
Devoted specifically to the safety of nuclear installations and the health and safety of the public, this division seeks a better understanding of the role of safety in the design, construction and operation of nuclear installation facilities. The division also promotes engineering and scientific technology advancement associated with the safety of such facilities.
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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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.
P. Maka, E. Van Heerden, M. Rezaee
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 1 | April 2025 | Pages S987-S993
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2024.2315905
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Evaluating atmospheric dispersion and radiological doses in the vicinity of buildings is required for small modular reactors (SMRs) because of the reduced size of their exclusion area boundary. The current Canadian nuclear industry tool for these calculations implements the methodology defined in CSA Standard N288.2-M91, which was written to support large Canada Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) nuclear reactors as opposed to SMRs. The ORCA (On/offsite Radiological Consequences of Accidents) code has been developed to address this technical concern in addition to evaluating atmospheric dispersion and doses in the far field. The code calculates worker and public doses following an airborne release of radioactive material into the atmosphere under postulated accident conditions at a nuclear facility. The current paper presents the key assumptions and methods utilized in ORCA and discusses qualification of the software to the requirements of CSA Standard N286.7-16. The new model is applicable to SMRs and existing reactor designs and reduces conservatisms in the near field (i.e., <1 km from the source) relative to the methods in CSA N288.2-M91.