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The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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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.
Budhi Sagar, Paul W. Eslinger, Robert G. Baca
Nuclear Technology | Volume 75 | Number 3 | December 1986 | Pages 338-349
Technical Paper | Radioactive Waste Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT86-A33846
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Estimation of potential radionuclide releases from the waste package subsystem of a nuclear waste repository is required for two reasons: (a) to judge whether the engineered barrier system complies with the performance regulations prescribed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission; and (b) to provide radionuclide source terms needed to predict the isolation performance of the natural barriers (i.e., geologic medium), which must be compared with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency safety standard. A probabilistic approach developed at the Basalt Waste Isolation Project (BWIP) for the estimation of radionuclide releases from a proposed nuclear waste repository in basalt is presented. The central idea of this approach is that uncertainties in both the radionuclide transport parameters and the random nature of container failures impact the estimation of release rates. Details of the method are provided that account for both sources of uncertainty. Sample applications are presented that are based on preliminary data. Briefly, the BWIP methodology consists of (a) a container corrosion model, (b) a model describing the random sequence of container failures in time, (c) a stochastic transport model to obtain the probability distribution of releases from a single container failing at a specified time, and (d) a model to integrate the releases from the randomly failing containers in the repository.