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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
2024 ANS Winter Conference and Expo
November 17–21, 2024
Orlando, FL|Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld
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
A proactive approach to reactor vessel aging management
Unit 2 at the Prairie Island nuclear power plant near Red Wing, Minn., underwent an outage in fall 2023, which included extensive work on the reactor vessel using a novel approach to replace baffle-former bolts and lower radial clevis insert bolts. The work relied on extensive analysis beforehand to determine which bolts to replace such that only the new bolts were structurally credited for performance of their safety function. This proactive approach eliminated the need for costly contingencies associated with inspections.
R. J. Estep, T. H. Prettyman, G. A. Sheppard
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 118 | Number 3 | November 1994 | Pages 145-152
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE94-A19380
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Current methods for the nondestructive assay of special nuclear materials (SNM) and trans-uranic (TRU) waste in 208- drums can give assay errors of 100% or more when the drum matrix and/or radionuclide distribution is nonuniform. This problem is addressed by the development of the tomographic-gamma-scanner (TGS) method for assaying heterogeneous drummed SNM/TRU waste. The TGS method improves on the well-established segmented-gamma-scanner (SGS) method by performing low-resolution tomographic emission and transmission scans on the drum, yielding coarse three-dimensional images of the matrix density and radionuclide distributions. The images are used to make accurate, point-to-point attenuation corrections. The TGS geometric counting efficiency is 60% that of a typical SGS device, allowing a TGS assay time of only 28 min/drum with a one-detector system. The TGS method may also be useful for nondestructive examination. Currently, TGS is the only practical method of imaging SNM in drums.