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.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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
Jul 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2025
Nuclear Technology
August 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Deep Space: The new frontier of radiation controls
In commercial nuclear power, there has always been a deliberate tension between the regulator and the utility owner. The regulator fundamentally exists to protect the worker, and the utility, to make a profit. It is a win-win balance.
From the U.S. nuclear industry has emerged a brilliantly successful occupational nuclear safety record—largely the result of an ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) process that has driven exposure rates down to what only a decade ago would have been considered unthinkable. In the U.S. nuclear industry, the system has accomplished an excellent, nearly seamless process that succeeds to the benefit of both employee and utility owner.
Miltiadis Alamaniotis, Sangkyu Lee, Tatjana Jevremovic
Nuclear Technology | Volume 191 | Number 1 | July 2015 | Pages 41-57
Technical Paper | Radiation Transport and Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT14-75
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Radioisotope identification from low-count-rate spectra or spectra obtained through low-resolution detectors constitutes a challenging environment for accurate spectral analysis. The use of intelligent processing algorithms is a significant step in analyzing spectra, conceivably increasing the accuracy of the nuclide identification in such scenarios. This paper introduces an intelligent methodology for automated processing of low-count gamma-ray spectra acquired with a scintillation detector aimed at identifying radioisotope patterns, and it evaluates the performance of this methodology against a set of experimentally acquired gamma-ray spectra. The novel methodology adopts tools from the “artificial intelligence library” to preprocess the spectrum and subsequently identify radioisotopes. In particular, in the preprocessing step, the measured spectrum is divided into equally long energy intervals, whose values are replaced with those computed by a support vector regressor equipped with a linear kernel function. In the next step, the fuzzy logic–based identifier matches spectral peaks with entries in the spectral library, aiming at identifying isotopic signatures in the spectrum. The proposed intelligent methodology is benchmarked against the multiple-linear-regression (MLR) spectrum-fitting algorithm. Assessment results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology in identifying isotopes compared with the MLR algorithm by significantly reducing the number of false detections and improving correct detection performance. Furthermore, the proposed methodology exhibits an overall higher detection sensitivity (by 13.3%) and precision (by 46.8%) than those obtained with MLR.