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Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
Meeting Spotlight
Utility Working Conference and Vendor Technology Expo (UWC 2024)
August 4–7, 2024
Marco Island, FL|JW Marriott Marco Island
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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
August 2024
Nuclear Technology
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Latest News
ARPA-E announces $40 million to develop transmutation technologies for UNF
The Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) announced $40 million in funding to develop cutting-edge technologies to enable the transmutation of used nuclear fuel into less-radioactive substances. According to ARPA-E, the new initiative addresses one of the agency’s core goals as outlined by Congress: to provide transformative solutions to improve the management, cleanup, and disposal of radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel.
Karen Colins, Yu Liu, Liqian Li, Kiranpreet Birdee
Nuclear Technology | Volume 201 | Number 2 | February 2018 | Pages 113-121
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1411718
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Proximate to nuclear power plant severe accidents, sustained high levels of gamma radiative flux are perilous not only to human health but also to the functionality of conventional radiation-monitoring devices. Effective accident mitigation presents a significant challenge because the gamma radiation adversely affects the means by which it is measured. Deployments of large numbers of radiation-hardened monitoring devices, required to meet the demands of adequate system reliability and the large spatiotemporal scales associated with such accidents, are expected to be prohibitively expensive. As an affordable alternative, this paper proposes usage of a wireless sensor network (WSN) built with unshielded low-cost integrated circuits (ICs) acting as consumable proportional sensors of gamma radiation dose. Adverse responses of ICs to damaging gamma radiation dose can be characterized statistically, in controlled laboratory experiments. In subsequent field application, responses of individual ICs, transmitted over a WSN to a remote computer, can be translated into local dose measurements using correlations obtained via the laboratory characterization. Experiments to characterize adverse response to radiation dose were performed on multiple complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor–based electrically erasable programmable read-only memory devices in a Gammacell 220 Cobalt-60 Irradiation Unit (60Co source) at the Canadian Nuclear Laboratories. Details of the experiments, data analyses, and a small-scale prototype WSN are discussed in this paper. Outcomes of the experiments a nd analysis support the concept of using low-cost consumable ICs in a WSN to measure high levels of gamma radiation dose associated with nuclear power plant severe accidents.