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Division Spotlight
Accelerator Applications
The division was organized to promote the advancement of knowledge of the use of particle accelerator technologies for nuclear and other applications. It focuses on production of neutrons and other particles, utilization of these particles for scientific or industrial purposes, such as the production or destruction of radionuclides significant to energy, medicine, defense or other endeavors, as well as imaging and diagnostics.
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!
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High-temperature plumbing and advanced reactors
The use of nuclear fission power and its role in impacting climate change is hotly debated. Fission advocates argue that short-term solutions would involve the rapid deployment of Gen III+ nuclear reactors, like Vogtle-3 and -4, while long-term climate change impact would rely on the creation and implementation of Gen IV reactors, “inherently safe” reactors that use passive laws of physics and chemistry rather than active controls such as valves and pumps to operate safely. While Gen IV reactors vary in many ways, one thing unites nearly all of them: the use of exotic, high-temperature coolants. These fluids, like molten salts and liquid metals, can enable reactor engineers to design much safer nuclear reactors—ultimately because the boiling point of each fluid is extremely high. Fluids that remain liquid over large temperature ranges can provide good heat transfer through many demanding conditions, all with minimal pressurization. Although the most apparent use for these fluids is advanced fission power, they have the potential to be applied to other power generation sources such as fusion, thermal storage, solar, or high-temperature process heat.1–3
Zhenyu Wang, Zungang Wang, Jian Sun, Zhiyuan Li, Shanxue Xi, Xing Wei, Weiqi Huang, Chunzhi Zhou
Nuclear Technology | Volume 211 | Number 2 | February 2025 | Pages 332-343
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2024.2325751
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Reverse reconstruction methods for the radiation field do not require information on the radioactive source and are capable of constructing the radiation field using a small amount of monitoring data, showing huge significance for radiation protection. However, in previous studies, inverse reconstruction methods have given less consideration to variations in the time dimension. Herein, the principle of the Poisson Kriging method solved by the surrogate model has been analyzed, and the Poisson Kriging method has been applied to the inverse reconstruction of two-dimensional radiation fields at different moments.
On this basis, this work also investigated the effects of the principal function and correlation coefficient model on the objective function, the results of which demonstrate that the quadratic polynomial principal function and the Gaussian model correlation coefficient have good stability and convergence. Compared with the inverse distance weighting methods and the radial basis function methods, the Poisson Kriging method has smaller errors, showing that it is more suitable for reconstructing complex radiation fields.
Finally, the Poisson Kriging method was applied to the Fukushima nuclear accident radiation field calculation. The Pearson correlation coefficient of its results was r = 0.49, reflecting the validity of this method. Our work provides a calculation method for the spatial distribution and trend of the radiation field in the early stages of a nuclear accident, which is helpful for furthering radiation protection and emergency responses to nuclear accidents.