ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Division Spotlight
Fusion Energy
This division promotes the development and timely introduction of fusion energy as a sustainable energy source with favorable economic, environmental, and safety attributes. The division cooperates with other organizations on common issues of multidisciplinary fusion science and technology, conducts professional meetings, and disseminates technical information in support of these goals. Members focus on the assessment and resolution of critical developmental issues for practical fusion energy applications.
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
May 2025
Nuclear Technology
April 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
First astatine-labeled compound shipped in the U.S.
The Department of Energy’s National Isotope Development Center (NIDC) on March 31 announced the successful long-distance shipment in the United States of a biologically active compound labeled with the medical radioisotope astatine-211 (At-211). Because previous shipments have included only the “bare” isotope, the NIDC has described the development as “unleashing medical innovation.”
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.
