ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Division Spotlight
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.
Meeting Spotlight
Utility Working Conference and Vendor Technology Expo (UWC 2024)
August 4–7, 2024
Marco Island, FL|JW Marriott Marco Island
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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2024
Nuclear Technology
August 2024
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Taking shape: Fusion energy ecosystems built with public-private partnerships
It’s possible to describe fusion in simple terms: heat and squeeze small atoms to get abundant clean energy. But there’s nothing simple about getting fusion ready for the grid.
Private developers, national lab and university researchers, suppliers, and end users working toward that goal are developing a range of complex technologies to reach fusion temperatures and pressures, confounded by science and technology gaps linked to plasma behavior; materials, diagnostics, and electronics for extreme environments; fuel cycle sustainability; and economics.
Xiangpeng Meng, Yuanyuan Liu, Bin Wu, Jianping Cheng, Li Wang, Yu Wang, Ning Su
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 4 | April 2022 | Pages 753-760
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2021.1945358
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Detecting the activity of 210Pb in the human skull by counting its 46.5-keV gamma rays in vivo is a promising method to reconstruct one’s cumulative radon intake, based on which associated lung cancer risk can be evaluated. However, this technique is strongly challenged by the background radiation level, which can be largely categorized as room background and subject background. In this work, we quantitatively assess the performance of the phoswich detector in suppressing background radiation resulting from 40K ubiquitously present in human subjects under in vivo measurements using Monte Carlo simulations. We first determined the region of interest for 210Pb gamma-ray detection to be 31 to 61 keV and focused on the background level inside this region caused by two 40K decay processes. It is found that the 1.46-MeV gamma-ray–led background can be reduced by 40% by the phoswich detector operating in anticoincidence mode whereas the 1.31-MeV beta-particle–led background is almost unaffected. This observation is understood through the dependence of the anticoincidence efficiency on the incident gamma-ray energies. Our results suggest that the 1.31-MeV beta-particle–led background is much larger and harder to suppress than the 1.46-MeV gamma-ray–led background, and they call for more investigations in the background reduction techniques for 210Pb in vivo measurement.