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Division Spotlight
Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy
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.
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
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.”
Arvind Sundaram, Hany Abdel-Khalik
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 8 | August 2021 | Pages 1163-1181
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1812349
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Can predictive models develop cognizance or awareness of how they have been used? Can models detect if they are being manipulated or executed in nonauthorized manners? Can a software track information propagation through its subroutines to improve execution efficiency? Can this be achieved in a covert manner, i.e., avoiding the use of additional variables, additional lines of code, and conventional logging files, and instead rely directly on the physics being simulated to develop the required cognizance? Achieving these goals under the looming threat of insiders is considered an open challenging problem. This paper introduces a new modeling paradigm to covertly develop cognizance that is of critical value when predictive software is used in both adversarial and nonadversarial settings. Given the wide range of applications possible with this new modeling paradigm, the paper will focus on introducing the mathematical theory and limit the initial demonstration to a physics-based model of a nuclear reactor. This model describes a representative industrial control system of a nuclear reactor model containing two coupled subsystems: a heat-producing core and a steam generator. The goal is to demonstrate how each subsystem physics model can remain cognizant of the state of the subsystem. The proposed methodology will provide communication solutions for future reactor technologies to enable advanced reactor control and remote reactor operations.