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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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.
Joseph Cochran, Subhash C. Sarin, Nathan Lau, (Virginia Tech)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 1672-1690
A Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) outage is a planned period of time during which the plant does not produce energy and undergoes offline refueling and maintenance. For a commercial power plant, an outage window could last up to two months during which thousands of activities are performed. These activities are related by precedence thereby constituting an activity network. A team of planners/schedulers develops an outage schedule at least a year in advance of the execution of an outage. A significant loss of revenue incurs for every extra outage day beyond the planned period. The four scheduling problems that are typically faced in outage scheduling and planning include: (1) selection of outage window for a collection of NPPs, (2) generation of a feasible initial outage schedule, (3) updating the outage schedule when unplanned activities arise, and (4) measuring the risk of a given outage schedule. In this paper, we present approaches for each of these problems as well as highlight the areas for potential future research. Outage activity networks with both deterministic and stochastic durations are considered.