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Growth beyond megawatts
Hash Hashemianpresident@ans.org
When talking about growth in the nuclear sector, there can be a somewhat myopic focus on increasing capacity from year to year. Certainly, we all feel a degree of excitement when new projects are announced, and such announcements are undoubtedly a reflection of growth in the field, but it’s important to keep in mind that growth in nuclear has many metrics and takes many forms.
Nuclear growth—beyond megawatts—also takes the form of increasing international engagement. That engagement looks like newcomer countries building their nuclear sectors for the first time. It also looks like countries with established nuclear sectors deepening their connections and collaborations. This is one of the reasons I have been focused throughout my presidency on bringing more international members and organizations into the fold of the American Nuclear Society.
Valerio Mascolino, Alireza Haghighat, Jonathan M. Link
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 11 | November 2025 | Pages 1772-1793
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2025.2471698
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Carbon Hydrogen Anti-Neutrino Detector with a Lithium Enhanced Raghavan optical lattice (CHANDLER) detector is an innovative detector design that is able to detect electron antineutrinos from operating nuclear reactors from their inverse beta decay (IBD) interactions within its lattice. High-energy neutrons from cosmic rays can leave a similar signature. In an effort to determine the quenching factor of CHANDLER to high-energy neutron events, a prototype of the system, the MicroCHANDLER detector, has been deployed at the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory (TUNL) to perform experiments using TUNL’s Tandem Van de Graaf accelerator to accelerate deuterium ions to produce high-energy, cosmic-ray–like neutrons in a tritiated-titanium target. The goal of the campaign was to determine the proton quenching factor of the scintillator used in the detector. This paper discusses the Monte Carlo modeling and analysis performed using the MCNP6.1.0 code system. The main goal of the work is to determine the time and space of neutron energy deposition signatures in the detector lattice as a function of the deuterium ion beam energy. In addition, the variation of the response in the presence of a polyethylene shield between the neutron source and the detector is investigated. The findings from this analysis will then be employed to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of CHANDLER by discriminating high-energy neutron- induced events from the IBD events.