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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.
Allan K. Järvine, Alan G. Murchison, Peter G. Keech, Mahesh D. Pandey
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 7 | July 2020 | Pages 1036-1058
Regular Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1700730
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Lifetime predictions of used nuclear fuel containers (UFCs) destined for permanent storage in deep geological repositories are challenged by the uncertainty surrounding the environment and resultant performance of both the containers and the balance of engineered barriers over repository timescales. Much of the work to characterize the response of engineered barriers to postulated evolving environmental conditions and degradation mechanisms is limited to very short-term laboratory tests or at best in situ large-scale experiments spanning less than a few decades. While much is learned from these test programs, the fact remains that long-term performance of many tens of thousands of UFCs across a timescale of 100 000 years or more cannot be estimated with a significant degree of confidence by extrapolating single-point results of short-term experiments. This is particularly true when there is a desire to understand the progression of container failures and the timing of contaminants subsequently released into the geosphere. Lifetime predictions for UFCs require a probabilistic approach to address uncertainty. In the present work, a recently developed probabilistic corrosion model to estimate the life expectancy of copper-coated UFCs destined for a Canadian geological repository is expanded by modeling the impact of latent copper-coating defects and repository temperature on the key container life-limiting mechanism: sulfide-induced corrosion.