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Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
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2021 ANS Winter Meeting and Technology Expo
November 30–December 3, 2021
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Animation depicts Hanford’s direct-feed waste treatment process
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) has released an animated video of the Direct-Feed Low-Activity Waste (DFLAW) Program at the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash. The video shows the integrated procedure for treating Hanford’s radioactive tank waste, a process EM says is a key component of its strategic cleanup vision.
View the animation here.
Changyeon Yoon, Wonho Lee
Nuclear Technology | Volume 204 | Number 3 | December 2018 | Pages 386-395
Technical Paper | dx.doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1493318
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Performance of Compton positron emission tomography (PET) is studied in this paper using qualitative and quantitative methods. Lutetium-yttrium oxyorthosilicate (LYSO), lutetium-gadolinium oxyorthosilicate (LGSO), and CdZnTe (CZT) materials are used for Compton PET. LYSO is widely used for conventional PET, and LGSO is a prospective scintillator material for PET detectors. CZT is one of the semiconductor materials that have high energy and position resolution. For conventional PET, only the photoelectric effect is considered a valid interaction for image reconstruction. However, Compton scattering tracing technology is applied for our Compton PET to additionally use Compton scattering events for image reconstruction. It is relatively difficult to use multiple layers for PET made of scintillators, as electronic circuits must be attached to each layer. For this reason, conventional PET generally uses only one layer for each detector module and limits the spatial resolution in the depth direction. In contrast, it is possible for a CZT detector to measure a depth of interest based on the cathode-to-anode signal ratio or electron drift time with relatively simple electronic circuits. Furthermore, CZT materials have high spatial and energy resolutions. Therefore, the position and energy information of the radiation interactions in the detector module can be precisely calculated to determine the interaction sequence, and hence, the information from the Compton scattering can be used for image reconstruction in PET. For this reason, the reconstructed image of CZT PET can show better quality than those of scintillator PETs. The detection efficiency and quality of the reconstructed image are significantly increased by including the Compton scattering effect as a valid interaction process for image reconstruction because Compton scattering has twice the interaction probability of the photoelectric effect at 511 keV. In this paper, the effectiveness of including Compton scattering events for PET reconstruction was evaluated for scintillators and CZT semiconductor detectors. The maximum likelihood expectation and maximization reconstruction method was applied for conventional and Compton PET reconstruction, and the qualities of the reconstructed images were evaluated.
