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Division Spotlight
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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Glass strategy: Hanford’s enhanced waste glass program
The mission of the Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection (ORP) is to complete the safe cleanup of waste resulting from decades of nuclear weapons development. One of the most technologically challenging responsibilities is the safe disposition of approximately 56 million gallons of radioactive waste historically stored in 177 tanks at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
ORP has a clear incentive to reduce the overall mission duration and cost. One pathway is to develop and deploy innovative technical solutions that can advance baseline flow sheets toward higher efficiency operations while reducing identified risks without compromising safety. Vitrification is the baseline process that will convert both high-level and low-level radioactive waste at Hanford into a stable glass waste form for long-term storage and disposal.
Although vitrification is a mature technology, there are key areas where technology can further reduce operational risks, advance baseline processes to maximize waste throughput, and provide the underpinning to enhance operational flexibility; all steps in reducing mission duration and cost.
R. J. Sheu, Y. F. Chen, S. H. Jiang, J. N. Wang, U. T. Lin
Nuclear Technology | Volume 175 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 335-342
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the 16th Biennial Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division / Radiation and Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A12305
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This study reevaluates the dose rates at the site boundary of an independent spent-fuel storage installation (ISFSI) using the MAVRIC computational sequence in the SCALE6 code package. Based on advanced variance-reduction techniques and powerful geometry modeling capabilities, MAVRIC can tackle this large ISFSI shielding problem by directly simulating the radiation transport in a full-scale model. This study started with a benchmark calculation of a single storage cask and then investigated the impact of a fully loaded ISFSI on the dose rates at the site boundary. Because of the short distance to the nearest site boundary, additional shielding to the cask itself or the site is necessary to meet the stringent design dose limit. Compared to the two-step cask-by-cask approach adopted in the original safety analysis report, this method of analyzing the site boundary doses is straightforward and efficient enough to allow us to evaluate the effect of the cask design modification and to test various options for further improvement.
