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Reimagining nuclear materials for the future of medicine
Nuclear medicine has come a long way since Henri Becquerel first observed the penetrating energy of radioactive materials in 1896. Today, technetium-99m alone is used in more than 40 million diagnostic procedures every year—from cardiovascular imaging and bone scans to cancer detection—making it the undisputed workhorse of nuclear medicine. That single statistic tells you something important: An enormous portion of modern diagnostic medicine rests on a surprisingly narrow foundation, one built around a small number of aging research reactors that were never originally designed for continuous isotope production.
Ruixian Fang, Dan G. Cacuci (Univ of South Carolina)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 451-459
The “predictive modeling for coupled multi-physics systems (PM_CMPS)” methodology is applied in this work to the numerical simulation model of the mechanical draft cooling tower (MDCT) located in the F-area at Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) in order to improve the predictions of this model by combining computational information with measurements of outlet air humidity, outlet air and outlet water temperatures. At the outlet of this cooling tower, where measurements of the quantities of interest are available, the PM_CMPS reduces the predicted uncertainties for these quantities to values that are smaller than either the computed or the measured uncertainties. The PM_CMPS has also been applied to reduce the uncertainties for quantities of interest inside the tower’s fill section, where no direct measurements are available. The maximum reductions of uncertainties occur at the locations where direct measurements are available. At other locations, the predicted response uncertainties are reduced by the PM_CMPS methodology to values that are smaller than the modeling uncertainties arising from the imprecisely known model parameters.