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Decommissioning & Environmental Sciences
The mission of the Decommissioning and Environmental Sciences (DES) Division is to promote the development and use of those skills and technologies associated with the use of nuclear energy and the optimal management and stewardship of the environment, sustainable development, decommissioning, remediation, reutilization, and long-term surveillance and maintenance of nuclear-related installations, and sites. The target audience for this effort is the membership of the Division, the Society, and the public at large.
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International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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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
IAEA to help monitor plastic pollution in the Galapagos Islands
The International Atomic Energy Agency announced that its Nuclear Technology for Controlling Plastic Pollution (NUTEC Plastics) initiative has partnered with Ecuador’s Oceanographic Institute of the Navy (INOCAR) and Polytechnic School of the Coast (ESPOL) to build microplastic monitoring and analytical capacity to address the growing threat of marine microplastic pollution in the Galapagos Islands.
Zhen Wang, Jonny Rutqvist, Yuan Wang, Colin Leung, Andrew Hoch, Ying Dai
Nuclear Technology | Volume 187 | Number 2 | August 2014 | Pages 158-168
Technical Paper | Radioactive Waste Management and Disposal | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-76
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We present an extended multiple interacting continua (Ex-MINC) model of fractured rock masses that uses Oda's crack tensor theory to upscale the hydraulic and mechanical properties. The Ex-MINC concept includes separate connected continua representing active fractures, inactive fractures, and matrix to represent the fracture-matrix system. The crack tensor theory was used to calculate the stress-dependent permeability tensor and compliance tensor for individual grid blocks. By doing this, we transformed a discrete fracture network model into a grid-based continuum model. The Ex-MINC model was verified against an existing analytical solution, and the entire Ex-MINC/crack tensor model approach was applied to a benchmark test (BMT) related to coupled stress, fluid flow, and transport through a 20-×20-m model domain of heavily fractured media. This BMT was part of the international DECOVALEX project for the development of coupled models and their validation, thus providing us with the opportunity to compare our results with the results of independent models. We conducted the coupled hydraulic and mechanical modeling with TOUGH-FLAC, a simulator based on the TOUGH2 multiphase flow code and the FLAC3D geomechanical code. The results of our simulations were generally consistent with the results of the other independent modeling approaches and showed how inactive fractures impeded solute transport through the fractured system by providing an additional fracture surface area as an avenue for increasing fracture matrix diffusion.