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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
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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Latest News
Commercial nuclear innovation "new space" age
In early 2006, a start-up company launched a small rocket from a tiny island in the Pacific. It exploded, showering the island with debris. A year later, a second launch attempt sent a rocket to space but failed to make orbit, burning up in the atmosphere. Another year brought a third attempt—and a third failure. The following month, in September 2008, the company used the last of its funds to launch a fourth rocket. It reached orbit, making history as the first privately funded liquid-fueled rocket to do so.
Yoshitaka Naito, Kazuo Azekura
Nuclear Technology | Volume 204 | Number 1 | October 2018 | Pages 94-100
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1469344
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this paper, a method is proposed to evaluate the extent of subcriticality of an accident-damaged nuclear reactor. With this method the activity ratio of two fission product (FP) rare gas nuclides and is measured. From the measured value, the value of the nuclides in the fuel region is estimated by correcting for the time lag incurred when the gases diffuse from the fuel region to the measuring point. A simple expression for an effective multiplication factor has been derived that uses the corrected -to- activity ratio and the -to- fission yield ratios of and but that does not require information on the amount or distribution of the fuel material, making the proposed method very simple. This method has the advantage that FP rare gases can easily leak from the reactor core through many openings and gaps, reaching germanium counters without reacting with other materials.