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Division Spotlight
Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy
The mission of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy Division (NNPD) is to promote the peaceful use of nuclear technology while simultaneously preventing the diversion and misuse of nuclear material and technology through appropriate safeguards and security, and promotion of nuclear nonproliferation policies. To achieve this mission, the objectives of the NNPD are to: Promote policy that discourages the proliferation of nuclear technology and material to inappropriate entities. Provide information to ANS members, the technical community at large, opinion leaders, and decision makers to improve their understanding of nuclear nonproliferation issues. Become a recognized technical resource on nuclear nonproliferation, safeguards, and security issues. Serve as the integration and coordination body for nuclear nonproliferation activities for the ANS. Work cooperatively with other ANS divisions to achieve these objective nonproliferation policies.
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
Smarter waste strategies: Helping deliver on the promise of advanced nuclear
At COP28, held in Dubai in 2023, a clear consensus emerged: Nuclear energy must be a cornerstone of the global clean energy transition. With electricity demand projected to soar as we decarbonize not just power but also industry, transport, and heat, the case for new nuclear is compelling. More than 20 countries committed to tripling global nuclear capacity by 2050. In the United States alone, the Department of Energy forecasts that the country’s current nuclear capacity could more than triple, adding 200 GW of new nuclear to the existing 95 GW by mid-century.
Shawn W. St. Germain, Ahmad Al Rashdan (INL)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 858-867
In an effort to improve the economic viability of nuclear power plants, utilities must reduce the cost of preventive maintenance. Any change to the preventive maintenance strategy comes with some risk that equipment reliability could be negatively impacted. There are opportunities to reduce the risk of equipment failures through improved condition monitoring. Improved condition monitoring could be achieved through either (or both) increasing the amount and type of data collected or taking advantage of improved analytical techniques to extract better insights from the data. The goal is to minimize the total cost of maintenance by having a good understanding of and balance between the savings harvested by a reduction in preventive maintenance and the cost of increased equipment failures and the increased cost of additional monitoring. Idaho National Laboratory (INL) is working on a technology roadmap to assist plants in improving their monitoring capability. The objectives of this roadmap are to outline the steps that should be taken to ensure a utility has the necessary information and tools to properly assess the potential savings, costs, and risks associated with maintenance optimization efforts. One of the keys to the roadmap for setting up an optimized system includes an understanding of the data needed, how it is collected, stored, and made available for analysis. This paper outlines at a high level the typical data sources that will be used to make value-based maintenance decisions. For each of these data sources, there likely exists a current state of practice for collecting the data, an existing but more efficient method of collecting data, and a new but not yet developed method for collecting data. This paper will try and identify for each data source where these potential improvements are so utilities can decide where to apply resources to minimize the total cost of maintenance. Potential data sources to support condition monitoring that provide an opportunity to streamline the data collection or data storage to facilitate the collation of data to support improved analytics include; maintenance work orders, surveillance procedures, Operator logs, plant computer process parameters, vendor provided data, system engineers notebooks and corrective action program databases. This paper will discuss areas for improved data handling for several data sources.
