ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Dec 2025
Jul 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
January 2026
Nuclear Technology
December 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
November 2025
Latest News
AI at work: Southern Nuclear’s adoption of Copilot agents drives fleet forward
Southern Nuclear is leading the charge in artificial intelligence integration, with employee-developed applications driving efficiencies in maintenance, operations, safety, and performance.
The tools span all roles within the company, with thousands of documented uses throughout the fleet, including improved maintenance efficiency, risk awareness in maintenance activities, and better-informed decision-making. The data-intensive process of preparing for and executing maintenance operations is streamlined by leveraging AI to put the right information at the fingertips for maintenance leaders, planners, schedulers, engineers, and technicians.
F. T. Avignone III, L. P. Hopkins, Z. D. Greenwood
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 72 | Number 2 | November 1979 | Pages 216-221
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE79-A19465
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The theoretical beta spectrum of the thermal fission fragments of 235U in secular equilibrium was calculated using recent fission yields, nuclear decay scheme data, and very recent semi-empirical mass formulas to predict beta Q values of nuclides with unknown energy level structure. Better agreement with experiment is achieved when these isotopes are assumed to contain all of the excited states of isotopes with known decay schemes with the same atomic number Z and with neutron numbers N differing by even integers. The beta branching ratios for the unknown isotopes were assumed to be the renormalized collection of branching ratios found in all known isotopes of the families described above. The results obtained with these narrower restrictions are in better general agreement with experiment than those that replace the excited states and branching ratios of the unknown nuclides with those obtained by taking broad averages over known isotopes. There still appears to be some disagreement between theory and experiment, particularly at the high-energy end of the spectrum.