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Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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Glass strategy: Hanford’s enhanced waste glass program
The mission of the Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection (ORP) is to complete the safe cleanup of waste resulting from decades of nuclear weapons development. One of the most technologically challenging responsibilities is the safe disposition of approximately 56 million gallons of radioactive waste historically stored in 177 tanks at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
ORP has a clear incentive to reduce the overall mission duration and cost. One pathway is to develop and deploy innovative technical solutions that can advance baseline flow sheets toward higher efficiency operations while reducing identified risks without compromising safety. Vitrification is the baseline process that will convert both high-level and low-level radioactive waste at Hanford into a stable glass waste form for long-term storage and disposal.
Although vitrification is a mature technology, there are key areas where technology can further reduce operational risks, advance baseline processes to maximize waste throughput, and provide the underpinning to enhance operational flexibility; all steps in reducing mission duration and cost.
L. Sudderth, D. Perez-Nunez, D. Keiser, S. McDeavitt
Nuclear Technology | Volume 202 | Number 1 | April 2018 | Pages 81-93
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1420336
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A fluidized bed chemical vapor deposition (FB-CVD) system with an inverted reactor was used to develop barrier coatings of zirconium nitride on the surface of U 8 wt% Mo microspheres in order to examine the resulting coating structure and composition, as well as to evaluate the effects of certain process parameters on the coating properties. The process utilized the metal-organic precursor tetrakis(dimethylamino)zirconium heated to 51°C ± 2°C. Time-dependent studies analyzed the coating produced after 2 to 8 days of operation at 100 mL/min precursor carrier flow rate and 500 mL/min fluidization flow rate. Flow-rate–dependent studies produced coated samples using a total flow rate of 600 mL/min, with the precursor carrier flow rate ranging from 100 to 300 mL/min and the fluidization flow rate adjusted accordingly. Ultrahigh-purity argon was used for the precursor carrier and fluidization gas. The CVD reaction was carried out at 280°C ± 10°C with precursor transport tubes heated to 60°C to 75°C. The zirconium-based coatings were manufactured up to 2.2 ± 0.3 µm thick after 2 days of deposition. The estimated coating thickness was not significantly impacted by extending the duration of the deposition process or increasing the precursor carrier gas flow rate. Imaging of the microsphere cross sections provided evidence of uranium oxide, zirconium oxide, and zirconium nitride layers formed within the coating, with nitrogen content becoming more dominant farther from the bulk U-Mo surface. Certain modifications to the process would improve the results, including installing the system inside an inert atmosphere to limit oxygen contamination and higher resolution analyses to better determine coating structure, and finally, performance of a kinetic study of the coating process, particularly over the first 24 h in which the majority of the deposition was suspected to have occurred by enabling partial powder removal during FB-CVD operation to analyze samples from different points within a single experiment.