ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
Mar 2026
Jan 2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
March 2026
Nuclear Technology
February 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
April 2026
Latest News
NN Asks: What hurdles stand in the way of nuclear power’s global expansion?
Jake Jurewicz
Nuclear technology is mature. It provides firm power at scale with minimal externalities and has done so for decades. The core problem isn’t about the technology—it is how the plants are built. Nuclear construction has a well-documented history of cost and schedule overruns. Previous nuclear plants often spent more than twice what was first budgeted, making nuclear among the power technologies with the largest average cost overruns worldwide.
Recent projects illustrate how severe the problem can be. In South Carolina, the V.C. Summer nuclear expansion saw projected costs rise from roughly $10 billion to more than $25 billion before the project was abandoned in 2017, by which time more than $9 billion had already been spent and customers were stuck paying for a site they have yet to benefit from.
K. Wong, B. Erdelyi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 175 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 40-47
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the 16th Biennial Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division / Radiation Transport and Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A12267
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Proton computed tomography (pCT) has become a lively research field in medical imaging. Its importance lies in its ability to accurately locate the Bragg peak where the tumor is positioned for proton therapy treatment planning. The quality of the pCT image is primarily affected by the spatial resolution and relative electron density resolution. A measure of the spatial resolution is the amount of expected deviation of the actual proton paths from the theoretically derived paths based on the experimentally available data, the so-called most likely paths (MLPs). The MLPs are derived using the assumption that the object to be imaged is homogeneous water. Geant4 Monte Carlo simulations were used to simulate the actual proton paths through some inhomogeneous phantoms and were compared with MLP calculations. Statistical analyses were conducted to determine the spatial resolution of the protons in different phantoms as a function of inhomogeneity location, amount, and density.