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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Latest News
Senate EPW Committee to hold Nieh nomination hearing
Nieh
The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will hold a nomination hearing Wednesday for Ho Nieh, President Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as commission at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Trump nominated Nieh on July 30 to serve as NRC commissioner the remainder of a term that will expire June 30, 2029, as Nuclear NewsWire previously reported.
Nieh has been vice president of regulatory affairs at Southern Nuclear since 2021, though since June 2024 he has been at the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations as a loaned executive.
A return to the NRC: If confirmed by the Senate, Nieh would be returning to the NRC after three previous stints totaling nearly 20 years.
Muneerah A. Al-Aqeel
Nuclear Technology | Volume 211 | Number 4 | April 2025 | Pages 742-754
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2024.2355405
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In modern life, cement products have become an essential material for the foundations in many structural building designs. Because of this, the natural effects of this material need to be tested and cannot be ignored. Modeling interactions of gamma rays with several cementitious compounds is the focus of this study. Gamma radiations exist naturally and artificially, but with limited gamma-ray energies, which are not easy to access for experimental gamma attenuation studies. So in the current work, a wide range of low gamma-ray energies (0.01 to 0.356 MeV) are applied to investigate the gamma radiation attenuation properties theoretically for different cement materials. Also, the Monte Carlo statistical method is applied using the Geant4 toolkit to simulate the results.
The outcomes are compared with theoretical values using XCOM to validate at these energies. The effective atomic number (), electron density (), and half-value layers (HVLs) for the studied samples are computed based on the simulated mass attenuation coefficient (), as expected. The outcomes show good agreement between the simulated results with those calculated theoretically by XCOM within an 11% deviation.
The silica fume sample showed a slightly higher value compared with the other samples. The dependence of the photon energy and cement composition on the values of the and HVLs are investigated and discussed. In addition, the values of and for all cement samples behaved similarly in the given photon energy range, and they decreased as the photon energy increased.