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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.
Yen-Fu Chen, Yen-Kung Lin, Rong-Jiun Sheu, Shiang-Huei Jiang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 168 | Number 2 | November 2009 | Pages 508-512
Shielding | Special Issue on the 11th International Conference on Radiation Shielding and the 15th Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division (Part 2) / Decontamination/Decommissioning | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A9234
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The paper aims to estimate the residual activity in the concrete shielding of a nuclear power plant (NPP) after 40 yr of design service life and to determine if the whole massive concrete shielding must be treated as radioactive waste for future decommissioning. The process was a combination of experiment and calculation. Nonradioactive concrete samples collected from the Lungmen NPP were measured to determine the initial concentrations of major, minor, and trace elements in the concrete shielding by neutron activation analysis, inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry, and elemental analysis. The neutron flux distribution and depth-dependent cross sections, which were generated by SAS1, in the 60-cm-thick reactor shielding wall and 200-cm-thick dry well wall of the Lungmen NPP were fed to the ORIGEN-S code to calculate the activity distribution in the concrete shielding after 40 yr of reactor full-power operation. Comparing the activity with the exemption levels, it was found that the dry well wall of the Lungmen NPP can be handled as construction waste for immediate decommissioning. However, most of the reactor shielding wall must be treated as radioactive waste even after a 25-yr cooling time.