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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
Meeting Spotlight
ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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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Latest News
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.”
Emily H. Vu, Aaron J. Olson
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 2 | February 2023 | Pages 212-232
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2116378
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Conditional Point Sampling (CoPS) is our newly proposed Monte Carlo method for transport in stochastic media that has been demonstrated to achieve highly accurate mean response results and to compute variance of the mean caused by random spatial mixing. The ability of CoPS to efficiently characterize the effects of random spatial mixing beyond the mean is hindered by the algorithm’s potentially unbounded computer memory footprint. Thus, in previous work, we established two limited-memory techniques for CoPS to improve required computer memory, i.e., recent memory (RM) CoPS and amnesia radius (AR) CoPS, the latter of which enables CoPS to tractably compute probability density functions (PDFs) of response. In this work, we create a limited-memory framework that allows CoPS to combine the advantages of limited-memory techniques and populate the framework with the two inaugural techniques of RM and AR. The proposed framework enables the user to control the computational performance of CoPS by making problem-specific trade-offs between accuracy, computer memory footprint, and characterization of response distributions based on input parameters. We present mean leakage results, material-dependent scalar flux, leakage PDFs, and computer memory footprint computed using this new framework. By selecting different input parameters in our proposed limited-memory framework, CoPS is demonstrated to roughly match the accuracy and computer memory footprint of the established approximate method Chord Length Sampling or to provide response distribution information comparable to the brute-force benchmark approach while improving the computer memory footprint compared to the original CoPS algorithm.