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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
Utility Working Conference and Vendor Technology Expo (UWC 2024)
August 4–7, 2024
Marco Island, FL|JW Marriott Marco Island
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
Jul 2024
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Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
August 2024
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
ARPA-E announces $40 million to develop transmutation technologies for UNF
The Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) announced $40 million in funding to develop cutting-edge technologies to enable the transmutation of used nuclear fuel into less-radioactive substances. According to ARPA-E, the new initiative addresses one of the agency’s core goals as outlined by Congress: to provide transformative solutions to improve the management, cleanup, and disposal of radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel.
Benjamin Dechenaux
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 195 | Number 5 | May 2021 | Pages 538-554
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1847980
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The analysis of the results of a depletion code is often considered a tedious and delicate task, for it requires both the processing of large volumes of information (the time-dependent composition of up to thousands of isotopes) and an extensive knowledge of nuclear reactions and associated nuclear data. From these observations, dedicated developments have been integrated to the upcoming version of the Monte Carlo depletion code VESTA 2.2 in order to implement an innovative representation of depletion problems. The aim is to provide users with an adaptable and efficient framework to ease the analysis of the results of the code and facilitate their interpretation. This effort ultimately culminates in the development of the representation of the isotopic evolution of a given system as a directed graph.
In this paper, it is shown that the Bateman equation encoded in the VESTA code indeed possesses a natural interpretation in terms of a directed cyclic graph, and it is proposed to explore some of the insight one can gain from the graph representation of a depletion problem. Starting from the new capabilities of the code, it is shown how one can build on the wealth of existing methods of graph theory in order to gain useful information about the nuclear reactions taking place in a material under irradiation. The graph representation of a depletion problem being especially simple in activation problems—for then only a limited number of nuclides and reactions are involved—the graph representation and its associated tools will be used to study the evolution of the structure materials of a simplified model of the ITER fusion reactor.