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Nuclear Criticality Safety
NCSD provides communication among nuclear criticality safety professionals through the development of standards, the evolution of training methods and materials, the presentation of technical data and procedures, and the creation of specialty publications. In these ways, the division furthers the exchange of technical information on nuclear criticality safety with the ultimate goal of promoting the safe handling of fissionable materials outside reactors.
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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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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.
Pola Lydia Lagari, Styliani Pantopoulou, Miltos Alamaniotis, Lefteri H. Tsoukalas
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 8 | August 2021 | Pages 1270-1279
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1816743
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Since radionuclides have unique characteristic gamma-ray spectra, usually maintained as a set of (energy, counts/energy) ordered pairs, an explicit functional representation would be indisputably useful. In this paper, the Gamma Detector Response and Analysis Software has been used to simulate the gamma-ray spectra as it would be collected by an NaI detector for a set of 70 radionuclides. Gaussian radial basis function (RBF) networks that offer simple, closed-form expressions are then trained to represent each of these spectra. Hence, a library consisting of 70 RBF networks for the corresponding radionuclides has been built. The presence of these library-contained radionuclides in a given gamma-ray spectrum of an unknown source is identified by an algorithm that employs a linear combination of the library spectra to approximate the unknown spectrum. The combination coefficients are then determined by minimizing the squared deviation error function under convexity constraints.