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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Reflections on NOW
Hash Hasemianpresident@ans.org
Last month, I talked about my goal of strengthening ANS’s voice, in part by attending three conferences. I have now checked the first event off that list: the Nuclear Opportunities Workshop.
This year, NOW took another step in outgrowing its “workshop” moniker and transitioning to a full-fledged regional conference and expo. What started only a few years ago as a small gathering in Oak Ridge, Tenn., with roughly 50 attendees has skyrocketed to an event with 1,100 people in attendance in Knoxville.
NOW’s popularity reflected how busy the roughly 350 nuclear companies in Tennessee have been in recent years. There is significant work going on surrounding Gen IV reactor development and deployment, advancements in new nuclear fuels, and defense-related builds like the Uranium Processing Facility.
Sarah Scarboro, Nolan Hertel, Eric Burgett, Rebecca Howell, Armin Ansari
Nuclear Technology | Volume 168 | Number 1 | October 2009 | Pages 169-172
Dose/Dose Rate | Special Issue on the 11th International Conference on Radiation Shielding and the 15th Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division (Part 1) / Radiation Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A9120
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the event of a terrorist act involving a radiological agent, internal contamination due to inhalation is a potential health threat. When a large population is potentially impacted, there is need for methodology to serve as an initial screening or triage tool to rapidly identify individuals with significant amounts of internal contamination and to assist in prioritizing collection of large numbers of bioassay samples needed in such an incident. Common handheld radiation detectors and medical devices are tools that can effectively and rapidly screen a large number of people for internal contamination due to gamma-emitting isotopes. This work investigated the use of a common medical device, a thyroid uptake system or thyroid probe, in screening for internal contamination in individuals. The response of a thyroid uptake system in such a situation can be estimated by using a validated Monte Carlo model of the thyroid uptake system and various human phantoms. A computational model of the thyroid uptake system was built using the Los Alamos Particle Transport Code, MCNP Version 5. The validation of this computational model was demonstrated by comparisons to a series of benchmark measurements using the actual device and six isotopes with a range of gamma-ray emission energies.