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Division Spotlight
Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
Meeting Spotlight
2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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!
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Latest News
Canada clears Darlington to produce Lu-177 and Y-90
The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission has amended Ontario Power Generation’s power reactor operating license for Darlington nuclear power plant to authorize the production of the medical radioisotopes lutetium-177 and yttrium-90.
Xia Bing, Jiong Guo, Chunlin Wei, Ding She, Jian Zhang, Fu Li (Tsinghua Univ)
Proceedings | 16th International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management Conference (IHLRWM 2017) | Charlotte, NC, April 9-13, 2017 | Pages 848-852
The pebble bed high temperature reactors (PB-HTRs) are one of the promising reactor types for the next generation nuclear systems. Some intrinsic features of the PB-HTRs’ spherical fuel element embedded with the TRISO coated fuel particles bring high proliferation-resistance to the PB-HTR spent fuel storage, including the continuous on-line fueling strategy, the difficulty of processing TRISO particles, the low heavy metal density in the fuel pebbles and the high depletion of plutonium. The material accountancy concept and methodology of PB-HTR spent fuel storage are proposed in this work. For PB-HTRs, the spent fuel storage should be treated as an item facility; however, the items in PB-HTR spent fuel storage are the spent fuel containers, instead of the spent fuel assemblies in conventional PWR’s spent fuel storage. The accountancy of nuclear material should be implemented by evaluating the average burnup value of a batch of spent fuels. For the equilibrium core of PB-HTR, the average burnup value of a batch of spent fuel pebbles is determined by the integral power during the period when these pebbles are unloaded from the reactor core. Furthermore, the burnup value of each spent fuel pebble can also be measured by gamma spectroscopy upon the long-lived fission product 137Cs. After evaluating the spent fuel burnup, the dependency of the amounts of heavy metal nuclides upon the burnup value of a spent fuel pebble is estimated by the depletion calculations. It is revealed that the non-proliferation features of PB-HTR spent fuel storage is excellent and the accountancy methodology proposed in this work is feasible. Besides the high safety features, the high proliferation-resistance can be another attraction of the PB-HTRs.