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Division Spotlight
Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
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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Latest News
From South Korea to Belgium: Testing a high-density research reactor fuel
The Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute has developed a high-density uranium silicide fuel designed to replace high-enriched uranium in research reactors. Recent irradiation tests appear to be successful, KAERI reports, which means the fuel could be commercialized to continue a key global nuclear nonproliferation effort—converting research reactors to run on low-enriched uranium fuel.
Wouter C. de Wet, Lawrence W. Townsend, X. George Xu, Whitney J. Smith
Nuclear Technology | Volume 192 | Number 3 | December 2015 | Pages 308-313
Technical Note | Radiation Biology | doi.org/10.13182/NT15-21
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the many significant challenges mankind faces as we look to expand our footprint in outer space is the hostile space radiation environment. Not unlike many other mission parameters, the doses imparted to astronauts from extraterrestrial radiation could potentially be a limiting factor when considering the longevity of any manned mission. Thus, a detailed knowledge of dose and dose distribution with regard to the tissue-dependent International Commission on Radiological Protection limits would be beneficial to ensure crew safety.
In this work, the Standalone Package for Enhanced Estimation of Dose Distribution (SPEEDD) is developed in order to provide a method of calculating an accurate three-dimensional dose distribution for a space crew. The current version presents a prototype of the software package. The three sources considered when operating in space are solar particle events, galactic cosmic radiation, and trapped radiation belts. In this technical note, trapped radiation will not be discussed in great detail. SPEEDD combines high-fidelity human phantoms with depth-dose tables in order to rapidly calculate whole-body dose as well as individual organ doses. The anatomical phantoms used in SPEEDD are the RPI Adult Male and the RPI Adult Female. They were developed by the Rensselaer Radiation Measurement & Dosimetry Group and are cubically voxelized with a resolution of 2.7 and 2.5 mm, respectively. Generated using the High Energy Transport Code–Human Exploration and Development in Space (HETC-HEDS) Monte Carlo radiation transport code, the depth-dose tables consist of all ions from hydrogen to iron characterized at 18 energy bins ranging from 20 AMeV to 3 AGeV. SPEEDD was written in the Python™ scripting language and is designed to be easily installed or added to larger software packages.