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Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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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Commercial nuclear innovation "new space" age
In early 2006, a start-up company launched a small rocket from a tiny island in the Pacific. It exploded, showering the island with debris. A year later, a second launch attempt sent a rocket to space but failed to make orbit, burning up in the atmosphere. Another year brought a third attempt—and a third failure. The following month, in September 2008, the company used the last of its funds to launch a fourth rocket. It reached orbit, making history as the first privately funded liquid-fueled rocket to do so.
T. F. Nichols, L. W. Townsend, J. W. Hines
Nuclear Technology | Volume 168 | Number 1 | October 2009 | Pages 178-181
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-A9122
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The dose from solar particle events (SPEs) poses a serious threat to the health of astronauts. A method for forecasting the rate and total severity of such events would give time for the astronauts to take actions to mitigate the effects from an SPE. The danger posed from an SPE depends both on the total dose received and the temporal profile of the event. The temporal profile describes how quickly the dose will arrive. Previously developed methods used neural networks to predict the total dose from an event. Later, the ability to predict the temporal profiles was added to the neural network approach. Localized weighted regression (LWR) was then used to determine if better fits with less computer load could be accomplished. Previously, LWR was shown to be able to predict the total dose from an event. LWR is the model being used to forecast the dose and the temporal profile from an SPE. LWR is a nonparametric memory-based technique; it compares a new query to stored sets of exemplar data to make its predictions. It is able to forecast early in an SPE the dose and dose rate for the event. For many events the total dose is predicted within a factor of 2 within 20 min of the beginning of the event. SPEs that are within the training parameters have temporal predictions within a few hours of the start of the event. Using an LWR model, forecasts of the dose and dose rate can be made a few hours after the start of the event. The model is able to forecast most types of events within [approximately]10% accuracy. However, there are a few events that the model fails to forecast accurately.