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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.
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2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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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High-temperature plumbing and advanced reactors
The use of nuclear fission power and its role in impacting climate change is hotly debated. Fission advocates argue that short-term solutions would involve the rapid deployment of Gen III+ nuclear reactors, like Vogtle-3 and -4, while long-term climate change impact would rely on the creation and implementation of Gen IV reactors, “inherently safe” reactors that use passive laws of physics and chemistry rather than active controls such as valves and pumps to operate safely. While Gen IV reactors vary in many ways, one thing unites nearly all of them: the use of exotic, high-temperature coolants. These fluids, like molten salts and liquid metals, can enable reactor engineers to design much safer nuclear reactors—ultimately because the boiling point of each fluid is extremely high. Fluids that remain liquid over large temperature ranges can provide good heat transfer through many demanding conditions, all with minimal pressurization. Although the most apparent use for these fluids is advanced fission power, they have the potential to be applied to other power generation sources such as fusion, thermal storage, solar, or high-temperature process heat.1–3
Natalie Baughan, Alexis Poitrasson-Rivière, Jonathan B. Moody, Benjamin C. Lee, Edward P. Ficaro
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 7 | July 2020 | Pages 977-983
Technical Paper – Special section on the 2019 ANS Student Conference | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1708142
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Traditional patient selection criteria for cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) could be improved to predict patient response to CRT. Assessment of cardiac dyssynchrony using gated myocardial perfusion single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) or positron emission tomography (PET) in quantification software programs can be a reliable alternative. Quantitative parameters that describe the left ventricular phase analysis histogram such as phase standard deviation, bandwidth, and entropy aid in physician decision making. Entropy has been found in previous studies to be an effective parameter in identifying patients with left ventricular cardiac dyssynchrony. In this paper, we describe the characteristics of the entropy parameter with respect to other parameters such as phase standard deviation and histogram bandwidth. The implementation and testing of the entropy metric in the Corridor4DM (4DM) software package is also described. Algorithm testing and characterization were performed using computer-generated pseudorandom normal distributions. Implementation testing in 4DM was performed with two groups of patient data: patients with a left bundle branch block (LBBB) and patients with low pretest likelihood (LLk) for coronary artery disease. Entropy was found to monotonically increase in a semilogarithmic fashion with respect to phase standard deviation. For pseudorandom normal distributions with a constant standard deviation, the number of histogram bins used in calculating the entropy metric varied the metric by up to 61.3%; on average, an increase in histogram bins from 60 to 100 increased the mean entropy value by 11.0%. Implementation testing in 4DM showed agreement with the preliminary algorithm results and found a clear separation in entropy values between LLk and LBBB patients.
