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
Robotics & Remote Systems
The Mission of the Robotics and Remote Systems Division is to promote the development and application of immersive simulation, robotics, and remote systems for hazardous environments for the purpose of reducing hazardous exposure to individuals, reducing environmental hazards and reducing the cost of performing work.
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2024
Jan 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
May 2024
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
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.
Yan Wang, Zhijian Zhang, Anqi Xu, Huazhi Zhang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 198 | Number 3 | June 2017 | Pages 327-341
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1297174
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Quantitative risk values for nuclear power plants (NPPs) can be obtained by conducting a probabilistic safety assessment (PSA). However, people cannot judge the risk level without comparing the risk values from PSA with the standards of acceptable risk in society. Acceptable risk standards are affected by many factors, and those factors are preferentially considered in specified applications. There are many methods used to establish acceptable risk, and a comparative method is easily understood and accepted by the public. In the United States, both qualitative safety goals and quantitative health objectives (QHOs) for the current generation of light water reactors are established by a comparative method and are described in the Safety Goals Policy Statement published by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The evaluations of Level 1 PSA or Level 2 PSA are enough for most regulatory decisions and engineering practices.
In order to use PSA as a useful tool for regulation, establishing surrogate safety goals based on QHOs is necessary. But, there is no clear derivation process. First, this paper introduces the process of how to derive QHOs from qualitative safety goals and a model of quantitative health risk. Then, models using core damage frequency (CDF) and large early release frequency (LERF) based on the QHOs are introduced. The situations of nuclear power for each country—the number of plants, the types of reactors, the weather conditions, the population distribution, and the off-site emergency response plan—are different for each country. This paper considers two representative situations. The first situation is that a society has only a single NPP. The maximum consequence method is used to determine the surrogate safety goals for this situation. The second situation is that a society has multiple types of NPPs and the off-site environments of the plants are different from each other. The statistical tolerance intervals method is used to determine the surrogate safety goals for this situation. Data of individual early fatality and cancer fatality risk in China from 2004 to 2013 are collected and analyzed, and then, Chinese, U.S., Korean, and Japanese QHOs are compared. Chinese QHOs and some data from the reference are used to establish surrogate safety goals for the two situations, which are compared with existing surrogate safety goals CDF = 1E-04 per reactor and LERF = 1E-05/reactor-year.