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Division Spotlight
Decommissioning & Environmental Sciences
The mission of the Decommissioning and Environmental Sciences (DES) Division is to promote the development and use of those skills and technologies associated with the use of nuclear energy and the optimal management and stewardship of the environment, sustainable development, decommissioning, remediation, reutilization, and long-term surveillance and maintenance of nuclear-related installations, and sites. The target audience for this effort is the membership of the Division, the Society, and the public at large.
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2024 ANS Winter Conference and Expo
November 17–21, 2024
Orlando, FL|Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld
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
Oak Ridge community roundtable explores workforce challenges
Federal and contractor officials, community leaders, and educators gathered in Knoxville, Tenn., on October 29 for a roundtable event focused on ensuring the Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management (OREM) and its partners have the resources and infrastructure needed to support a robust, talented workforce in the years ahead.
Tracy E. Stover, Paul J. Turinsky
Nuclear Technology | Volume 180 | Number 2 | November 2012 | Pages 216-230
Technical Paper | Radiation Measurements and General Instrumentation | doi.org/10.13182/NT12-A14635
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The safe and economical design of new, innovative nuclear reactors will require uncertainty reduction in basic nuclear data that are input to simulations used during reactor design. These data uncertainties propagate to uncertainties in design responses, which in turn require the reactor designer to incorporate additional safety margins into the design, often increasing the cost of the reactor. Therefore, basic nuclear data need to be improved, and this is accomplished through experimentation, which is often done using cold critical experiments. Considering the high cost of nuclear experiments, it is desired to have an optimized experiment that will provide the experimental data needed for maximum uncertainty reduction in the design responses. However, the optimization of the experiment is coupled to the reactor design itself because with reduced uncertainty in the design responses the reactor design can be re-optimized. It is thus desired to find the experiment design that gives the most optimized reactor design. Solution of this nested optimization problem is made possible by the use of the simulated annealing algorithm. Cost values for experiment design specifications and reactor design specifications are estimated and used to compute a total savings by comparing the a posteriori reactor cost to the a priori cost accounting for the offsetting cost of the experiment. This was done for the Argonne National Laboratory-developed Advanced Burner Test Reactor design concept employing a modified Zero Power Physics Reactor as the experimental facility.