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Division Spotlight
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
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
Nuclear new build procurement considerations
It may seem counterintuitive, but the best time to enhance the ability to support operations and maintenance for a new plant is before construction starts. This is one of many lessons learned by the currently operating nuclear fleet. As construction and startup of many nuclear facilities was completed, it quickly became evident that the ability to efficiently support operations and maintenance was limited. Most of the information necessary to establish and manage procurement of spare and replacement items, maintenance, and configuration of the facilities was unavailable and had to be gathered on a case-by-case, “on-demand” basis. Absence of necessary information and the associated challenges resulted in the need for staff augmentation and multiyear-long projects to develop equipment bills of material and maintenance programs and to perform technical evaluations for the huge quantities of spare and replacement items being requested.
Wouter C. de Wet, Lawrence W. Townsend, X. George Xu, Whitney J. Smith
Nuclear Technology | Volume 192 | Number 3 | December 2015 | Pages 308-313
Technical Note | Radiation Biology | doi.org/10.13182/NT15-21
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the many significant challenges mankind faces as we look to expand our footprint in outer space is the hostile space radiation environment. Not unlike many other mission parameters, the doses imparted to astronauts from extraterrestrial radiation could potentially be a limiting factor when considering the longevity of any manned mission. Thus, a detailed knowledge of dose and dose distribution with regard to the tissue-dependent International Commission on Radiological Protection limits would be beneficial to ensure crew safety.
In this work, the Standalone Package for Enhanced Estimation of Dose Distribution (SPEEDD) is developed in order to provide a method of calculating an accurate three-dimensional dose distribution for a space crew. The current version presents a prototype of the software package. The three sources considered when operating in space are solar particle events, galactic cosmic radiation, and trapped radiation belts. In this technical note, trapped radiation will not be discussed in great detail. SPEEDD combines high-fidelity human phantoms with depth-dose tables in order to rapidly calculate whole-body dose as well as individual organ doses. The anatomical phantoms used in SPEEDD are the RPI Adult Male and the RPI Adult Female. They were developed by the Rensselaer Radiation Measurement & Dosimetry Group and are cubically voxelized with a resolution of 2.7 and 2.5 mm, respectively. Generated using the High Energy Transport Code–Human Exploration and Development in Space (HETC-HEDS) Monte Carlo radiation transport code, the depth-dose tables consist of all ions from hydrogen to iron characterized at 18 energy bins ranging from 20 AMeV to 3 AGeV. SPEEDD was written in the Python™ scripting language and is designed to be easily installed or added to larger software packages.