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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
The U.S. Million Person Study of Low-Dose-Rate Health Effects
There is a critical knowledge gap regarding the health consequences of exposure to radiation received gradually over time. While there is a plethora of studies on the risks of adverse outcomes from both acute and high-dose exposures, including the landmark study of atomic bomb survivors, these are not characteristic of the chronic exposure to low-dose radiation encountered in occupational and public settings. In addition, smaller cohorts have limited numbers leading to reduced statistical power.
Kaichao Sun, David Carpenter, Michael Ames, Akshay J. Dave, Lin-Wen Hu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 6 | June 2020 | Pages 924-937
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1679564
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Transient Reactor Test (TREAT) Facility at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) was officially restarted in 2017. In support of its restart project, investigations are taking place into the refurbishment and upgrade of TREAT’s experiment systems with modern technology. In considering augmenting the current TREAT instrumentation, a variety of miniature neutron and gamma sensors that may be able to operate in-core will be irradiated under steady-state and transient conditions. The TREAT instrumentation is typically calibrated at steady state below 100 kW. This power level features a thermal flux similar to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Research Reactor (MITR) at less than 100 kW. Low-power MITR operation was therefore chosen for initial instrumentation benchmarking. Following the MITR runs, the entire test assembly was shipped to INL. Shaped and temperature-limited transients were performed using TREAT’s M8-Calibration vehicle. A total of three test rounds has taken place, including two 1-week sessions at MITR and one 2-week session at TREAT. Overall, successful performance for the majority of the tested detectors is concluded under steady-state and transient conditions. These miniature sensors are capable of recognizing accurate full-width at half-maximum of the reactor pulse. However, compared to operation channels located at the TREAT biological shield, all in-core instrumentations show certain degrees of underestimation of the peak power magnitude.