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Aerospace Nuclear Science & Technology
Organized to promote the advancement of knowledge in the use of nuclear science and technologies in the aerospace application. Specialized nuclear-based technologies and applications are needed to advance the state-of-the-art in aerospace design, engineering and operations to explore planetary bodies in our solar system and beyond, plus enhance the safety of air travel, especially high speed air travel. Areas of interest will include but are not limited to the creation of nuclear-based power and propulsion systems, multifunctional materials to protect humans and electronic components from atmospheric, space, and nuclear power system radiation, human factor strategies for the safety and reliable operation of nuclear power and propulsion plants by non-specialized personnel and more.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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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Latest News
Direct waste transfer process quickens at Savannah River Site
The Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management’s liquid waste contractor at the Savannah River Site this month marked the first direct transfer of decontaminated waste from the Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) to the Saltstone Production Facility (SPF). This is a new step in optimizing waste processing, according to the DOE.
James E. Bevins, R. N. Slaybaugh
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 4 | April 2019 | Pages 542-562
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1496692
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper introduces Gnowee, a modular, Python-based, open-source hybrid metaheuristic optimization algorithm (available from https://github.com/SlaybaughLab/Gnowee). Gnowee is designed for rapid convergence to nearly globally optimum solutions for complex, constrained nuclear engineering problems with mixed-integer (MI) and combinatorial design vectors and high-cost, noisy, discontinuous, black box objective function evaluations. Gnowee’s hybrid metaheuristic framework is a new combination of a set of diverse, robust heuristics that appropriately balance diversification and intensification strategies across a wide range of optimization problems. There are many potential applications for this novel algorithm both within the nuclear community and beyond. Given that a set of well-known and studied nuclear benchmarks does not exist for the purpose of testing optimization algorithms, comparisons between Gnowee and several well-established metaheuristic algorithms are made for a set of 18 established continuous, MI, and combinatorial benchmarks representing a wide range of types of engineering problems and solution space behaviors. These results demonstrate Gnoweee to have superior flexibility and convergence characteristics over this diverse set of design spaces. We anticipate this wide range of applicability will make this algorithm desirable for many complex engineering applications.