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Division Spotlight
Robotics & Remote Systems
The Mission of the Robotics and Remote Systems Division is to promote the development and application of immersive simulation, robotics, and remote systems for hazardous environments for the purpose of reducing hazardous exposure to individuals, reducing environmental hazards and reducing the cost of performing work.
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
Norway’s Halden reactor takes first step toward decommissioning
The government of Norway has granted the transfer of the Halden research reactor from the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) to the state agency Norwegian Nuclear Decommissioning (NND). The 25-MWt Halden boiling water reactor operated from 1958 to 2018 and was used in the research of nuclear fuel, reactor internals, plant procedures and monitoring, and human factors.
Kai Tan, Fan Zhang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 198 | Number 12 | December 2024 | Pages 2437-2459
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2024.2303542
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Monitoring three-dimensional flux distribution in a nuclear reactor core is essential for improving safety and economics, which requires strategically placed in-core detectors. However, the deployment of these sensors is often constrained by physical, industrial, and economic limitations. This study treats optimizing the location of in-core detectors as a Markov decision process and develops a reinforcement learning (RL)–based framework to provide a solution for detector placement given a fixed number of detectors and available detector positions. The RL-based framework contains an environment consisting of a Proper Orthogonal Decomposition–based power reconstruction function paired with a novel reward function based on the power reconstruction error and a well-educated agent that updates the detector placement. Four RL algorithms including Proximal Policy Optimization, Deep Q-Network, Advantage Actor-Critic, and Monte Carlo Tree Search are investigated to optimize the detector placement and are analyzed. Genetic Algorithm (GA), a traditional optimization approach, is applied for comparison. The findings reveal that RL outperforms GA in terms of the quality of optimal solutions, demonstrating an inclination toward locating a global solution. Moreover, the flexible nature of RL enables the integration of developed novel reward functions from a specific reactor core into other reactors, considering the particular engineering requirements within the RL-based framework, thereby enhancing the optimization of in-core detector configurations.