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Meeting 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!
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Latest News
The U.S. Million Person Study of Low-Dose-Rate Health Effects
There is a critical knowledge gap regarding the health consequences of exposure to radiation received gradually over time. While there is a plethora of studies on the risks of adverse outcomes from both acute and high-dose exposures, including the landmark study of atomic bomb survivors, these are not characteristic of the chronic exposure to low-dose radiation encountered in occupational and public settings. In addition, smaller cohorts have limited numbers leading to reduced statistical power.
Sarah Miele, Pranav Karve, Sankaran Mahadevan (Vanderbilt Univ), Vivek Agarwal (INL)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 976-982
In this work, we investigate the suitability of a novel dynamics-based method, namely vibroacoustic modulation (VAM), for the detection and localization of cracks caused by the alkali-silica reaction (ASR). ASR is a chemical reaction between the cement and certain aggregates containing amorphous silica. In a VAM test, the structural component is excited using two frequencies. The frequency modulation (and hence the nonlinear structural behavior) appears as sidebands around the higher (probing) frequency in the linear spectrum (LS) of the measured response in the neighborhood of the damage zone. A map of the magnitude of such sidebands can be used to detect and localize the damage [1]. We perform laboratory experiments to investigate VAM-based damage diagnosis in thick concrete components. We describe laboratory testing on a cement slab containing four pockets of reactive aggregates placed at known locations. Our experiments show that VAMbased testing with optimized test parameters and suitable sensor density can potentially be used to detect and localize cracks in thick concrete structures.