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Division Spotlight
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
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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April 2024
Nuclear Technology
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February 2024
Latest News
Can hydrogen be the transportation fuel in an otherwise nuclear economy?
Let’s face it: The global economy should be powered primarily by nuclear power. And it probably will by the end of this century, with a still-significant assist from renewables and hydro. Once nuclear systems are dominant, the costs come down to where gas is now; and when carbon emissions are reduced to a small portion of their present state, it will become obvious that most other sources are only good in niche settings. I mean, why use small modular reactors to load-follow when they can just produce that power instead of buffering it?
Karen Colins, Yu Liu, Liqian Li, Kiranpreet Birdee
Nuclear Technology | Volume 201 | Number 2 | February 2018 | Pages 113-121
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1411718
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Proximate to nuclear power plant severe accidents, sustained high levels of gamma radiative flux are perilous not only to human health but also to the functionality of conventional radiation-monitoring devices. Effective accident mitigation presents a significant challenge because the gamma radiation adversely affects the means by which it is measured. Deployments of large numbers of radiation-hardened monitoring devices, required to meet the demands of adequate system reliability and the large spatiotemporal scales associated with such accidents, are expected to be prohibitively expensive. As an affordable alternative, this paper proposes usage of a wireless sensor network (WSN) built with unshielded low-cost integrated circuits (ICs) acting as consumable proportional sensors of gamma radiation dose. Adverse responses of ICs to damaging gamma radiation dose can be characterized statistically, in controlled laboratory experiments. In subsequent field application, responses of individual ICs, transmitted over a WSN to a remote computer, can be translated into local dose measurements using correlations obtained via the laboratory characterization. Experiments to characterize adverse response to radiation dose were performed on multiple complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor–based electrically erasable programmable read-only memory devices in a Gammacell 220 Cobalt-60 Irradiation Unit (60Co source) at the Canadian Nuclear Laboratories. Details of the experiments, data analyses, and a small-scale prototype WSN are discussed in this paper. Outcomes of the experiments a nd analysis support the concept of using low-cost consumable ICs in a WSN to measure high levels of gamma radiation dose associated with nuclear power plant severe accidents.