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Division Spotlight
Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
Meeting Spotlight
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Jun 2025
Jan 2025
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Nuclear Science and Engineering
July 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
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.
Markus Preston, Erik Branger, Sophie Grape, Olena Khotiaintseva
Nuclear Technology | Volume 210 | Number 10 | October 2024 | Pages 1952-1974
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2024.2304931
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
According to a recently proposed nuclear safeguards technique, monitoring the power-normalized, ex-core neutron detection rate over time could be used to detect undeclared changes to the fissile composition of a reactor core. In this study, Monte Carlo simulations have been used to verify some of the underlying assumptions of this technique and the possibilities of using it to detect undeclared fuel substitutions during the first 2-year cycle of a light water small modular reactor. Depletion calculations and neutron transport simulations were used to study the changes in the power-normalized neutron leakage rate through the core barrel upon fuel substitutions and whether these changes are fully explained by changes in the core fissile composition. Several substitution scenarios have been studied, where partially depleted fuel assemblies were substituted with fresh fuel assemblies after 1 year of irradiation.
The modeled substitution scenarios, which included substituting up to 4 out of 37 fuel assemblies in the core at a time, resulted in changes in of up to 3.5% depending on which fuel assemblies were substituted. The results indicate that the ex-core neutron signatures are not only sensitive to core-averaged nuclide densities, fission cross sections, and neutron flux, but also the spatial distributions of these and other parameters throughout the core. Effects such as these could mean that monitoring the core fissile composition with the proposed technique might be more complex than previously suggested.