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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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Latest News
College students help develop waste-measuring device at Hanford
A partnership between Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) and Washington State University has resulted in the development of a device to measure radioactive and chemical tank waste at the Hanford Site. WRPS is the contractor at Hanford for the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management.
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.