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
Human Factors, Instrumentation & Controls
Improving task performance, system reliability, system and personnel safety, efficiency, and effectiveness are the division's main objectives. Its major areas of interest include task design, procedures, training, instrument and control layout and placement, stress control, anthropometrics, psychological input, and motivation.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2024
Jan 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
May 2024
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Glass strategy: Hanford’s enhanced waste glass program
The mission of the Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection (ORP) is to complete the safe cleanup of waste resulting from decades of nuclear weapons development. One of the most technologically challenging responsibilities is the safe disposition of approximately 56 million gallons of radioactive waste historically stored in 177 tanks at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
ORP has a clear incentive to reduce the overall mission duration and cost. One pathway is to develop and deploy innovative technical solutions that can advance baseline flow sheets toward higher efficiency operations while reducing identified risks without compromising safety. Vitrification is the baseline process that will convert both high-level and low-level radioactive waste at Hanford into a stable glass waste form for long-term storage and disposal.
Although vitrification is a mature technology, there are key areas where technology can further reduce operational risks, advance baseline processes to maximize waste throughput, and provide the underpinning to enhance operational flexibility; all steps in reducing mission duration and cost.
Samuel E. Bays, Joseph Nielsen, Joshua Cogliati, Charles Wemple
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 5 | May 2022 | Pages 811-821
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2021.1980320
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The neutronics software, HELIOS, was validated in 2015 for performing core reload design and safety analysis of the Advanced Test Reactor. However, when HELIOS was benchmarked against historic fission-wire measurements (i.e., zero-power full-core measurements), a statistically resolved calculation-to-measurement bias was discovered. The azimuthal power along each fuel plate computed by HELIOS has consistently shown to underpredict measurements made by fission wires in historic zero-power tests near the fuel element side plates.
It was hypothesized during the HELIOS software validation work that this bias is attributable to local moderation in coolant vents in the side plates axially just above and below the fission wires on the fuel plate edges. This work used detailed MCNP and MC21 models of the side plate vents to test this hypothesis. By comparing the average azimuthal biases between HELIOS and two-dimensional and three-dimensional (3-D) MCNP models and a 3-D MC21 model, it was found that the HELIOS azimuthal bias is not due to the measurement.