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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
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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Glass strategy: Hanford’s enhanced waste glass program
The mission of the Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection (ORP) is to complete the safe cleanup of waste resulting from decades of nuclear weapons development. One of the most technologically challenging responsibilities is the safe disposition of approximately 56 million gallons of radioactive waste historically stored in 177 tanks at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
ORP has a clear incentive to reduce the overall mission duration and cost. One pathway is to develop and deploy innovative technical solutions that can advance baseline flow sheets toward higher efficiency operations while reducing identified risks without compromising safety. Vitrification is the baseline process that will convert both high-level and low-level radioactive waste at Hanford into a stable glass waste form for long-term storage and disposal.
Although vitrification is a mature technology, there are key areas where technology can further reduce operational risks, advance baseline processes to maximize waste throughput, and provide the underpinning to enhance operational flexibility; all steps in reducing mission duration and cost.
S. Joseph Cope, Robert B. Hayes
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 9 | September 2019 | Pages 1219-1235
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1590074
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The alpha activity discrimination problem between radon progeny and transuranic (TRU) isotopes is evaluated at the times relevant for radiological emergency response using temporal decay properties. This study evaluates various effects from naturally occurring radon progeny creating alpha spectral overlap with the TRU region of interest. The methodology helps to address the potential masking of a radiological threat at worst or, at best, inhibiting response efforts due to delays caused by high levels of radon progeny. This work seeks to provide a rapid, conservative TRU estimation method in as little as 30 min. Surrogate TRU activity is introduced to the assays via check sources as a validation test for discrimination against varied levels of radon progeny collected on environmental air samples. A 2-h activity decay profile counting window was sectioned into multiple combinations of 30-min increments to investigate optimal counting segments and to simulate potential field-collection scenarios with limited resource availability. The experiment sought to discriminate low levels of introduced TRU activity comparable to the natural background on each sampled filter. Using this approach, the study confirmed the utility of the estimation methodology in as little as 30 min. Additional measurement time taken in the decay profile demonstrated marked improvements in both accuracy and precision of the TRU activity estimate as expected. Studies on the potential functional dependence of fitting parameters that influence the TRU estimate and associated uncertainty may improve further model development. The methodology is flexible to accommodate any gross alpha/beta scalar counter and is designed to be implemented within a graded approach based on time and resource availability present in the response. The estimation framework enables rapid air assay with a proper technical basis in times not currently realized in radiological emergency response.