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Division Spotlight
Young Members Group
The Young Members Group works to encourage and enable all young professional members to be actively involved in the efforts and endeavors of the Society at all levels (Professional Divisions, ANS Governance, Local Sections, etc.) as they transition from the role of a student to the role of a professional. It sponsors non-technical workshops and meetings that provide professional development and networking opportunities for young professionals, collaborates with other Divisions and Groups in developing technical and non-technical content for topical and national meetings, encourages its members to participate in the activities of the Groups and Divisions that are closely related to their professional interests as well as in their local sections, introduces young members to the rules and governance structure of the Society, and nominates young professionals for awards and leadership opportunities available to members.
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.
S.Tina Ghosh, George E. Apostolakis
Nuclear Technology | Volume 153 | Number 1 | January 2006 | Pages 70-88
Technical Paper | Radioactive Waste Management and Disposal | doi.org/10.13182/NT06-A3690
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Performance assessments (PAs) are important sources of information for societal decisions in high-level radioactive waste (HLW) management, particularly in evaluating safety cases for proposed HLW repository development. Assessing risk from geologic repositories for HLW poses a significant challenge due to the uncertainties in modeling complex systems of such large temporal and spatial scales. Because of the extensive uncertainties, a typical safety case for a proposed HLW repository is comprised of PA results coupled with various defense-in-depth elements, such as the multibarrier requirement for repository design, and insights from supplementary analyses. This paper proposes an additional supplementary analysis, the Strategic Partitioning of Assumption Ranges and Consequences (SPARC), that could be used (a) in a safety case to help build confidence in a repository system and (b) to provide risk information for decisions on how to allocate resources for future research. The SPARC method extracts risk information from existing PAs and supporting databases by uncovering new information - namely, what sets of model parameter values taken together could produce substantially increased doses (SIDs) from the repository - and displays the results in SPARC trees. These sets of parameter values correspond to the failure scenarios of reactor probabilistic risk assessments. The SPARC method is applied to the proposed Yucca Mountain HLW repository, as a demonstrative example, and the results indicate that just one or a couple of the repository features working alone could "save" the repository from SIDs even in extremely challenging conditions. Such insights produced with the SPARC method could help significantly in focusing resources on future research to build confidence in the repository.
