ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Sep 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
August 2025
Latest News
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.
Hui Lin, Liangfeng Xu, Jia Jing, Guoli Li, Yang Zhu, Dong-Sheng Wu, Yuan-Ying Xu, Yican Wu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 168 | Number 3 | December 2009 | Pages 706-712
Accelerators | Special Issue on the 11th International Conference on Radiation Shielding and the 15th Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division (PART 3) / Accelerators | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A9294
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Photon external radiotherapy of cancer takes advantage of the physical interaction of the photon and the secondary electron with biological tissue to kill cancer cells. The current linac is important equipment for producing an X-ray. The Monte Carlo method has been demonstrated to be the most accurate method for radiotherapy issues such as dose calculation and plan verification. However, its application in the clinic requires detailed information on the beam characteristics. A large quantity of the consumptive time for multiple simulation phases, such as linac treatment head simulation, beam trimmer module simulation, and patient/phantom simulation, and storage for the phase-space file (PSF), which records the information of the transported particle, are two knotty issues also. Therefore, a set of simple and convenient multiple source models (MSMs) including five subsources for regular fields from 3 × 3 cm to 30 × 30 cm was built, which is based on a VARIAN 2300C 6 MV-X beam simulated by the Monte Carlo code BEAMnrc and produced by BEAMnrc's beam characteristics analysis utility BEAMDP (BEAM Data Processor). This MSM reduced the three simulation phases to one to effectively decrease the consumptive time. The storage issue about the PSF was also solved for MSM's small volume. The dose distribution of the five-source model in a homogeneous phantom was compared with that of the full linac simulation and measurement data to verify reliability. The characteristics of the subsources were analyzed to present their feature. This work provided the base for implementing the Monte Carlo algorithm into the Accurate Radiotherapy System.