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Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
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Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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.
Mathew W. Swinney, Charles M. Folden III, Ronald J. Ellis, Sunil S. Chirayath
Nuclear Technology | Volume 197 | Number 1 | January 2017 | Pages 1-11
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NT16-76
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A terrorist attack using an improvised nuclear device is one of the most serious dangers facing the United States. The work presented here is part of an effort to improve nuclear deterrence by developing a methodology to attribute weapons-grade plutonium to a source reactor by measuring the intrinsic physical characteristics of the interdicted plutonium. In order to demonstrate the developed methodology, plutonium samples were produced from depleted uranium dioxide (DUO2) surrogates irradiated in a fast-neutron environment. In order to replicate the neutron flux in a fast-neutron-spectrum reactor and obtain experimental samples emulating weapons-grade plutonium produced in the blanket of a fast breeder reactor, DUO2 samples were placed in a gadolinium sheath and irradiated in the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Previous computational work on this topic identified several fission products that could be used to distinguish between reactor types (fast and thermal reactors), specifically: 137Cs, 134Cs, 154Eu, 125Sb, 144Ce, 85Rb, 147Pm, and 150Sm along with the plutonium isotopes. Simulations of the fast neutron irradiation of the DUO2 fuel surrogates in the HFIR were carried out using the Monte Carlo radiation transport code MCNPX 2.7. Comparisons of the predicted values of plutonium and fission product concentrations to destructive and nondestructive assay measurements of neutron-irradiated DUO2 surrogates are presented here. The agreement between the predictions and gamma spectroscopic measurements in general were within 10% for 134Cs, 137Cs, 154Eu, and 144Ce. Additional experimental results (mass spectroscopy) agreed to within 5% for the following isotopes: 85Rb, 147Pm, 150Sm, 154Eu, 148Nd, 144Ce, and 239Pu. Two indicator isotopes previously suggested to differentiate between the reactor types were ruled out for use in the attribution methodology; 125Sb was ruled out due to the difficulty in accurately predicting its concentration, and 242Pu was ruled out because of its low content in weapons-grade plutonium.