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Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy
The mission of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy Division (NNPD) is to promote the peaceful use of nuclear technology while simultaneously preventing the diversion and misuse of nuclear material and technology through appropriate safeguards and security, and promotion of nuclear nonproliferation policies. To achieve this mission, the objectives of the NNPD are to: Promote policy that discourages the proliferation of nuclear technology and material to inappropriate entities. Provide information to ANS members, the technical community at large, opinion leaders, and decision makers to improve their understanding of nuclear nonproliferation issues. Become a recognized technical resource on nuclear nonproliferation, safeguards, and security issues. Serve as the integration and coordination body for nuclear nonproliferation activities for the ANS. Work cooperatively with other ANS divisions to achieve these objective nonproliferation policies.
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First astatine-labeled compound shipped in the U.S.
The Department of Energy’s National Isotope Development Center (NIDC) on March 31 announced the successful long-distance shipment in the United States of a biologically active compound labeled with the medical radioisotope astatine-211 (At-211). Because previous shipments have included only the “bare” isotope, the NIDC has described the development as “unleashing medical innovation.”
J. Mark DelGrande, Kirk A. Mathews
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 139 | Number 1 | September 2001 | Pages 33-46
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE00-69
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Conventional discrete ordinates transport calculations often produce negative fluxes due to unphysical negative scattering cross sections and/or as artifacts of spatial differencing schemes such as diamond difference. Inherently nonnegative spatial methods, such as the nonlinear, exponential characteristic spatial quadrature, eliminate negative fluxes while providing excellent accuracy, presuming the group-to-group, ordinate-to-ordinate cross sections are all nonnegative. A hybrid approach is introduced in which the flow from spatial cell to spatial cell uses discrete ordinates spatial quadratures, while anisotropic scattering of flux from one energy-angle bin (energy group and discrete element of solid angle) to another such bin is modeled using a Monte Carlo simulation to evaluate the bin-to-bin cross sections. The directional elements tile the sphere of directions; the ordinates for the spatial quadrature are at the centroids of the elements. The method is developed and contrasted with previous schemes for positive cross sections. An algorithm for evaluating the Monte Carlo (MC)-discrete elements (MC-DE) cross sections is described, and some test cases are presented. Transport calculations using MC-DE cross sections are compared with calculations using conventional cross sections and with MCNP calculations. In this testing, the new method is about as accurate as the conventional approach, and often is more accurate. The exponential characteristic spatial quadrature, using the MC-DE cross sections, is shown to provide useful results where linear characteristic and spherical harmonics provide negative scalar fluxes in every cell in a region.