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Division Spotlight
Materials Science & Technology
The objectives of MSTD are: promote the advancement of materials science in Nuclear Science Technology; support the multidisciplines which constitute it; encourage research by providing a forum for the presentation, exchange, and documentation of relevant information; promote the interaction and communication among its members; and recognize and reward its members for significant contributions to the field of materials science in nuclear technology.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver 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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Apr 2025
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Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2025
Nuclear Technology
May 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Sam Altman steps down as Oklo board chair
Advanced nuclear company Oklo Inc. has new leadership for its board of directors as billionaire Sam Altman is stepping down from the position he has held since 2015. The move is meant to open new partnership opportunities with OpenAI, where Altman is CEO, and other artificial intelligence companies.
A. Heifetz, D. Shribak, X. Huang, B. Wang, J. Saniie, R. Ponciroli, E. R. Koehl, S. Bakhtiari, R. B. Vilim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 4 | April 2021 | Pages 604-616
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1782626
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Transmission of information using elastic ultrasonic waves on existing metallic pipes provides an alternative communication option for a nuclear facility. The advantages of this approach consist of transmitting information through barriers, such as the containment building wall, with minimal modification of the existing hardware. Because bit rates on the order of kilobits per second are achievable, relatively large volumes of data, such as images, can be transmitted. A viable candidate for an ultrasonic communication channel is a stainless steel pipe of the chemical volume control system (CVCS) that penetrates through the reactor containment building wall through a sealed tunnel. To study ultrasonic communication under simulated nuclear facility conditions of high temperature, a test article was developed by installing heating tapes, temperature controllers, and thermal insulation on a laboratory CVCS-like stainless steel pipe. High temperature and radiation-resilient lithium niobate ultrasonic transducers were utilized for information transmission on the heated pipe. The amplitude shift keying (ASK) digital communication protocol was developed and implemented in a GNU Radio software–defined radio environment. A root-raised-cosine filter was introduced to suppress ultrasonic transducer ringing and thus reduce inter-symbol interference. This resulted in the enhancement of the data transmission bit rate compared to information encoding with square pulses. Demonstrations of communication at high temperature included transmission of a 90-KB image at the bit rate of 10 Kbps with a bit error rate of 10−3 across a 6-ft-long straight pipe heated up to 230°C. Additional preliminary studies were conducted to evaluate ultrasonic communication system resilience to environmental degradation and damage.