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Division Spotlight
Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy
The mission of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy Division (NNPD) is to promote the peaceful use of nuclear technology while simultaneously preventing the diversion and misuse of nuclear material and technology through appropriate safeguards and security, and promotion of nuclear nonproliferation policies. To achieve this mission, the objectives of the NNPD are to: Promote policy that discourages the proliferation of nuclear technology and material to inappropriate entities. Provide information to ANS members, the technical community at large, opinion leaders, and decision makers to improve their understanding of nuclear nonproliferation issues. Become a recognized technical resource on nuclear nonproliferation, safeguards, and security issues. Serve as the integration and coordination body for nuclear nonproliferation activities for the ANS. Work cooperatively with other ANS divisions to achieve these objective nonproliferation policies.
Meeting Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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
Take steps on SNF and HLW disposal
Matt Bowen
With a new administration and Congress, it is time once again to ponder what will happen—if anything—on U.S. spent nuclear fuel and high-level waste management policy over the next few years. One element of the forthcoming discussion seems clear: The executive and legislative branches are eager to talk about recycling commercial SNF. Whatever the merits of doing so, it does not obviate the need for one or more facilities for disposal of remaining long-lived radionuclides. For that reason, making progress on U.S. disposal capabilities remains urgent, lest the associated radionuclide inventories simply be left for future generations to deal with.
In March, Rick Perry, who was secretary of energy during President Trump’s first administration, observed that during his tenure at the Department of Energy it became clear to him that any plan to move SNF “required some practical consent of the receiving state and local community.”1
Gregory A. Szalkowski, Justin Roper
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 7 | July 2019 | Pages 905-911
Technical Paper – Selected papers from the 2018 ANS Student Conference | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1533349
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
With the increase in the precision of treatments delivered using radiotherapy machines, there has been a corresponding rise in demand for quality assurance tests that can verify the accuracy of these machines. One common test, star shot analysis, evaluates the isocenter stability of a radiotherapy machine using radiosensitive film or the electronic portal imaging device (EPID). This work details the development of an in-house method of automatically processing film and EPID images to conduct quality assurance testing. In contrast to commercially available software that analyzes a composite image star shot with multiple spokes superimposed on a single image, this work investigates a Gaussian peak finding technique while leveraging the EPID to image one spoke at a time.
Spoke-by-spoke analysis was used to investigate the effects of opposing angles on composite image star shot analysis and to assess for collimator trajectories with minimal walkout. This revealed that irradiating film using opposing angles can give artificially low variations in the radiation isocenter due to offsetting deviations from the true center and that walkout was not the same for every 180-deg arc for the collimator, implying that some rotation arcs could give less variation during treatment.
