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Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy
The mission of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy Division (NNPD) is to promote the peaceful use of nuclear technology while simultaneously preventing the diversion and misuse of nuclear material and technology through appropriate safeguards and security, and promotion of nuclear nonproliferation policies. To achieve this mission, the objectives of the NNPD are to: Promote policy that discourages the proliferation of nuclear technology and material to inappropriate entities. Provide information to ANS members, the technical community at large, opinion leaders, and decision makers to improve their understanding of nuclear nonproliferation issues. Become a recognized technical resource on nuclear nonproliferation, safeguards, and security issues. Serve as the integration and coordination body for nuclear nonproliferation activities for the ANS. Work cooperatively with other ANS divisions to achieve these objective nonproliferation policies.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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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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.
Gabriel Kooreman, Farzad Rahnema
Nuclear Technology | Volume 192 | Number 3 | December 2015 | Pages 264-277
Technical Paper | Radiation Transport and Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT14-150
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The hybrid Diffusion-Transport Homogenization (DTH) method has been improved by replacing the assembly-level fixed-source calculation step with a fixed number of whole-core transport sweeps following each homogenization step. Like the unmodified DTH method, the Enhanced hybrid Diffusion-Transport Homogenization (EDTH) method adds an “auxiliary cross-section” term to the right side of the transport equation in order to maintain consistency with the heterogeneous equation. As an improvement to the DTH method, the on-the-fly rehomogenization step of the EDTH method utilizes a fixed number of full-core transport sweeps in lieu of assembly-level fixed-source heterogeneous transport calculations. The EDTH method has been tested in one-dimensional reactor core benchmark problems typical of a boiling water reactor core, a gas-cooled thermal reactor [High Temperature Test Reactor (HTTR)] core, and a pressurized water reactor core with mixed-oxide fuel. The method has been shown to reproduce the heterogeneous transport flux profile with 0 to 46 pcm eigenvalue error and 0.1% to 1.8% mean relative flux error with a speedup factor of 1.4 to 4.5 times faster than the DTH method. This represents a speedup of 3.0 to 12.5 times compared to fine-mesh transport.