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The mission of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy Division (NNPD) is to promote the peaceful use of nuclear technology while simultaneously preventing the diversion and misuse of nuclear material and technology through appropriate safeguards and security, and promotion of nuclear nonproliferation policies. To achieve this mission, the objectives of the NNPD are to: Promote policy that discourages the proliferation of nuclear technology and material to inappropriate entities. Provide information to ANS members, the technical community at large, opinion leaders, and decision makers to improve their understanding of nuclear nonproliferation issues. Become a recognized technical resource on nuclear nonproliferation, safeguards, and security issues. Serve as the integration and coordination body for nuclear nonproliferation activities for the ANS. Work cooperatively with other ANS divisions to achieve these objective nonproliferation policies.
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Colin Judge: Testing structural materials in Idaho’s newest hot cell facility
Idaho National Laboratory’s newest facility—the Sample Preparation Laboratory (SPL)—sits across the road from the Hot Fuel Examination Facility (HFEF), which started operating in 1975. SPL will host the first new hot cells at INL’s Materials and Fuels Complex (MFC) in 50 years, giving INL researchers and partners new flexibility to test the structural properties of irradiated materials fresh from the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) or from a partner’s facility.
Materials meant to withstand extreme conditions in fission or fusion power plants must be tested under similar conditions and pushed past their breaking points so performance and limitations can be understood and improved. Once irradiated, materials samples can be cut down to size in SPL and packaged for testing in other facilities at INL or other national laboratories, commercial labs, or universities. But they can also be subjected to extreme thermal or corrosive conditions and mechanical testing right in SPL, explains Colin Judge, who, as INL’s division director for nuclear materials performance, oversees SPL and other facilities at the MFC.
SPL won’t go “hot” until January 2026, but Judge spoke with NN staff writer Susan Gallier about its capabilities as his team was moving instruments into the new facility.
Gregory A. Szalkowski, Justin Roper
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 7 | July 2019 | Pages 905-911
Technical Paper – Selected papers from the 2018 ANS Student Conference | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1533349
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
With the increase in the precision of treatments delivered using radiotherapy machines, there has been a corresponding rise in demand for quality assurance tests that can verify the accuracy of these machines. One common test, star shot analysis, evaluates the isocenter stability of a radiotherapy machine using radiosensitive film or the electronic portal imaging device (EPID). This work details the development of an in-house method of automatically processing film and EPID images to conduct quality assurance testing. In contrast to commercially available software that analyzes a composite image star shot with multiple spokes superimposed on a single image, this work investigates a Gaussian peak finding technique while leveraging the EPID to image one spoke at a time.
Spoke-by-spoke analysis was used to investigate the effects of opposing angles on composite image star shot analysis and to assess for collimator trajectories with minimal walkout. This revealed that irradiating film using opposing angles can give artificially low variations in the radiation isocenter due to offsetting deviations from the true center and that walkout was not the same for every 180-deg arc for the collimator, implying that some rotation arcs could give less variation during treatment.