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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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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Deep Space: The new frontier of radiation controls
In commercial nuclear power, there has always been a deliberate tension between the regulator and the utility owner. The regulator fundamentally exists to protect the worker, and the utility, to make a profit. It is a win-win balance.
From the U.S. nuclear industry has emerged a brilliantly successful occupational nuclear safety record—largely the result of an ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) process that has driven exposure rates down to what only a decade ago would have been considered unthinkable. In the U.S. nuclear industry, the system has accomplished an excellent, nearly seamless process that succeeds to the benefit of both employee and utility owner.
Athena A. Sagadevan, Sunil S. Chirayath
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 10 | October 2022 | Pages 1511-1521
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2057775
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
It has become a common practice to store sufficiently cooled spent nuclear fuel (SNF) assemblies in interim storage dry casks with passive cooling. These dry casks require nuclear safeguards monitoring because they contain plutonium. Past studies on dry cask modeling and simulations have shown that a remote monitoring system (RMS) situated inside the dry cask could continually monitor and detect the removal of even a single SNF assembly from the cask. This conceptual RMS design was tested by conducting laboratory-scale experiments using small-size 252Cf neutron sources. These small-size sources were surrounded by neutron-reflecting materials in the experiments to mimic the SNF assemblies as a surface neutron source to the fission chamber detectors of the RMS. Experimental and simulation results showed that the removal or diversion of even a single neutron source is detectable within 4 min with a probability of detection greater than 80%.