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Division Spotlight
Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
Meeting Spotlight
2022 ANS Annual Meeting
June 12–16, 2022
Anaheim, CA|Anaheim Hilton
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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2022
Nuclear Technology
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Latest News
A passionate call to save Diablo Canyon
In a recent opinion piece for the San Luis Obispo Tribune, Heather Hoff describes her conversion from nuclear energy skeptic to advocate and lays out the case for keeping the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant open beyond its planned closure in 2025.
Hoff, who is an operations procedure writer at Diablo Canyon, tells how she spent years "excessively and sometimes annoyingly" investigating her concerns about the safety of nuclear after she was first hired at Diablo Canyon. She adds that she almost quit her job after the Fukushima accident until realizing that many concerns about that event were triggered by "fear of nuclear, rather than nuclear itself.”
Nicolas Shugart, Benjamin Johnson, Jeffrey King, Alexandra Newman
Nuclear Technology | Volume 204 | Number 3 | December 2018 | Pages 260-282
Technical Paper | dx.doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1478056
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The ability to create nuclear weapons from 235U and 239Pu makes it imperative to closely account for these materials as they progress through a nuclear fuel cycle. Improved measurement systems provide more accurate estimates of material quantities and material unaccounted for (MUF). This paper provides examples of how two safeguards computational toolboxes can optimize and analyze hypothetical nuclear fuel cycle scenarios. The NUclear Measurement System Optimization (NUMSO) toolbox uses operations research techniques to find optimal solutions to safeguards measurement problems based on minimizing the variance of the estimated MUF. The SafeGuards Analysis (SGA) toolbox employs Monte Carlo techniques to analyze a given configuration of measurement methods and material flows to determine the probabilities of Type I (false detection) and Type II (missed detection) errors. Applying these toolboxes to a realistic fuel cycle scenario demonstrates the capability of NUMSO and SGA to address nuclear safeguards problems. Working in tandem, both toolboxes are able to determine how to quickly improve upon an existing safeguards measurement system and to calculate the resulting improvement in the error probabilities of the system. This information shows engineers not only how to develop new measurement systems but also how to improve existing systems in the most efficient manner.
