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Nuclear Criticality Safety
NCSD provides communication among nuclear criticality safety professionals through the development of standards, the evolution of training methods and materials, the presentation of technical data and procedures, and the creation of specialty publications. In these ways, the division furthers the exchange of technical information on nuclear criticality safety with the ultimate goal of promoting the safe handling of fissionable materials outside reactors.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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
Steam is a sign of cooling system function . . . at ITER
Steam from one of ITER’s ten induced-draft cooling cells offers visual confirmation of a successful cooling system test, the ITER organization announced April 30. ITER’s cooling system features 60 kilometers of piping with pumps, filters, and heat exchangers that can pull water through at up to 14 cubic meters per second. Once fully operational, two cooling loops—one to remove the heat generated by the plasma in the ITER tokamak and one for its supporting infrastructure—will be capable of extracting up to 1,200 MW of heat.
Jeremy W. King, Danielle M. South, Craig M. Marianno, Sunil S. Chirayath
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 11 | November 2022 | Pages 1635-1648
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2076487
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Dry casks will be a prevalent spent nuclear fuel (SNF) storage option until solutions for long-term storage or disposal are deployed. A dry cask storing 32 pressurized water reactor fuel assemblies will likely contain about 20 significant quantities of plutonium, so these structures require effective safeguards monitoring. An external remote monitoring system (RMS) is proposed to advance the current dry cask safeguards regime which relies on containment and surveillance. The objectives of this study were to assess the performance of the external RMS as a detection system and to develop a simulation approach for estimating measurements. Small-scale experiments of generic neutron source diversions mimicking SNF diversion from a dry cask were conducted and the nondetection probability was calculated for a variety of measurement times. MCNP simulations were carried out to assess the degree to which the measurement results could be predicted. A previous simulation methodology was advanced to consider uncertainty in the activity of sources being measured. The study concluded that the external RMS performs well as a neutron detection system and that MCNP simulation is a viable tool both for predicting measurements made with the external RMS and for calculating nondetection probabilities of hypothetical, generic diversion scenarios.