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Decommissioning & Environmental Sciences
The mission of the Decommissioning and Environmental Sciences (DES) Division is to promote the development and use of those skills and technologies associated with the use of nuclear energy and the optimal management and stewardship of the environment, sustainable development, decommissioning, remediation, reutilization, and long-term surveillance and maintenance of nuclear-related installations, and sites. The target audience for this effort is the membership of the Division, the Society, and the public at large.
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2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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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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Smarter waste strategies: Helping deliver on the promise of advanced nuclear
At COP28, held in Dubai in 2023, a clear consensus emerged: Nuclear energy must be a cornerstone of the global clean energy transition. With electricity demand projected to soar as we decarbonize not just power but also industry, transport, and heat, the case for new nuclear is compelling. More than 20 countries committed to tripling global nuclear capacity by 2050. In the United States alone, the Department of Energy forecasts that the country’s current nuclear capacity could more than triple, adding 200 GW of new nuclear to the existing 95 GW by mid-century.
Arvind Sundaram, Hany Abdel-Khalik
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 8 | August 2021 | Pages 1163-1181
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1812349
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Can predictive models develop cognizance or awareness of how they have been used? Can models detect if they are being manipulated or executed in nonauthorized manners? Can a software track information propagation through its subroutines to improve execution efficiency? Can this be achieved in a covert manner, i.e., avoiding the use of additional variables, additional lines of code, and conventional logging files, and instead rely directly on the physics being simulated to develop the required cognizance? Achieving these goals under the looming threat of insiders is considered an open challenging problem. This paper introduces a new modeling paradigm to covertly develop cognizance that is of critical value when predictive software is used in both adversarial and nonadversarial settings. Given the wide range of applications possible with this new modeling paradigm, the paper will focus on introducing the mathematical theory and limit the initial demonstration to a physics-based model of a nuclear reactor. This model describes a representative industrial control system of a nuclear reactor model containing two coupled subsystems: a heat-producing core and a steam generator. The goal is to demonstrate how each subsystem physics model can remain cognizant of the state of the subsystem. The proposed methodology will provide communication solutions for future reactor technologies to enable advanced reactor control and remote reactor operations.