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Division Spotlight
Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
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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August 2024
Latest News
Fire reported at Zaporizhzhia as Ukrainian troops advance toward Russia’s Kursk plant
Thick, black smoke pouring from one of the cooling towers at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant over the weekend raised alarm about safety at the facility as the military conflict with Russia continues.
On-site staff from the International Atomic Energy Agency witnessed the smoke and reported hearing multiple explosions at Zaporizhzhia, which is the largest nuclear plant in Europe and one of the largest worldwide.
Sai Chaitanya Tadepalli, Priti Kanth, P. V. Subhash
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 188 | Number 3 | December 2017 | Pages 282-293
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2017.1367570
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The next generation nuclear facilities like Gen-IV fission reactors and fusion plasma will have a huge amount of activated waste production and resulting harmful consequences in terms of radioactive responses such as activity, decay heat, and dose. It is imperative to understand and quantify the impact of individual parent elements or isotopes in the material on major radiological responses. Such quantification serves as an impact indicator. This paper attempts to develop a method to aid this quantification that would eventually offer a complete material activation analysis. Here, we begin by presenting the mathematical formulation to account for the contribution of the parent constituents of any irradiated material toward the radiological responses directly, defined as the contributing factor (CF). The method is easily adaptable to other activation solvers and provides the user with CFs of parents that highlight the individual importance of the constituents. These factors can be used to determine the impact of elements on radiological quantities and how much tailoring of these elements will affect the radiological response of the material. All these can be done in a single run of the code, developed as an aid to activation solvers. Moreover, improved response of the modified material composition after reducing harmful parents can be directly calculated using the derived CFs without rerunning the solver. Thus, an optimized composition of the material either isotopically or elementwise can be easily obtained. A few examples highlighting the application of this technique and its importance are provided at the end.