ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Division Spotlight
Materials Science & Technology
The objectives of MSTD are: promote the advancement of materials science in Nuclear Science Technology; support the multidisciplines which constitute it; encourage research by providing a forum for the presentation, exchange, and documentation of relevant information; promote the interaction and communication among its members; and recognize and reward its members for significant contributions to the field of materials science in nuclear technology.
Meeting Spotlight
2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Jun 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
July 2025
Nuclear Technology
June 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Former NRC commissioners lend support to efforts to eliminate mandatory hearings
A group of nine former nuclear regulatory commissioners sent a letter Wednesday to the current Nuclear Regulatory Commission members lending support to efforts to get rid of mandatory hearings in the licensing process, which should speed up the process by three to six months and save millions of dollars.
Amol Patil, Shoaib Usman
Nuclear Technology | Volume 165 | Number 2 | February 2009 | Pages 249-256
Technical Paper | Radiation Measurements and Instrumentation | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A4090
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper describes the finding of an experimental study to measure the detector paralysis factor and the use of this parameter in conjunction with detector dead time to better model detector dead-time response. The idealized one-parameter models, the paralyzable and nonparalyzable models, are inadequate to properly model the dead-time response of any real detector system. To address this deficiency, a more realistic two-parameter model is proposed that incorporates the paralysis factor of the detector in addition to the dead time. The revised two-parameter-based model is an extension of Lee and Gardner's two-dead-time model. A simple scheme is proposed to deduce these parameters from the recorded data based on the rise and drop of count rates from a decaying source. Measurements were made using 56Mn and 52V. The data collected in this study show that a high-purity germanium (HPGe) detector has a paralysis factor of ~50 to 77% and a dead time of 6 to 10 s. Using the data collected by Lee and Gardner, the paralysis factor for a Geiger-Mueller (GM) counter is estimated to be ~5%. These results are consistent with the approximating assumption that GM counters are nonparalyzing and HPGe detectors are paralyzing.