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Division Spotlight
Young Members Group
The Young Members Group works to encourage and enable all young professional members to be actively involved in the efforts and endeavors of the Society at all levels (Professional Divisions, ANS Governance, Local Sections, etc.) as they transition from the role of a student to the role of a professional. It sponsors non-technical workshops and meetings that provide professional development and networking opportunities for young professionals, collaborates with other Divisions and Groups in developing technical and non-technical content for topical and national meetings, encourages its members to participate in the activities of the Groups and Divisions that are closely related to their professional interests as well as in their local sections, introduces young members to the rules and governance structure of the Society, and nominates young professionals for awards and leadership opportunities available to members.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Winter Conference and Expo
November 17–21, 2024
Orlando, FL|Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld
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
September 2024
Nuclear Technology
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August 2024
Latest News
Nuclear new build procurement considerations
It may seem counterintuitive, but the best time to enhance the ability to support operations and maintenance for a new plant is before construction starts. This is one of many lessons learned by the currently operating nuclear fleet. As construction and startup of many nuclear facilities was completed, it quickly became evident that the ability to efficiently support operations and maintenance was limited. Most of the information necessary to establish and manage procurement of spare and replacement items, maintenance, and configuration of the facilities was unavailable and had to be gathered on a case-by-case, “on-demand” basis. Absence of necessary information and the associated challenges resulted in the need for staff augmentation and multiyear-long projects to develop equipment bills of material and maintenance programs and to perform technical evaluations for the huge quantities of spare and replacement items being requested.
Kyle L. Walton, John D. Brockman, Sudarshan K. Loyalka
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 1 | January 2023 | Pages 82-89
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2108687
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The diffusion of fission products (FPs) in reactor materials affects the nuclear source term. The diffusion coefficient itself is measured through various techniques. In the release method, it is of interest to know the initial distribution of the FPs in nuclear graphite or other materials from an exterior measurement like mass surface flux or cumulative mass release. In this paper, a Fredholm integral of the first kind is considered, relating the initial distribution to the cumulative release fraction of a diffusant from a spherically symmetric body. The Tikhonov regularization, conjugate gradient least-squares (CGLS) method, and algebraic reconstruction technique (ART) with nonnegativity and conserved mass constraints were compared to fractional release data from a simulated linear profile using data for Cs diffusion in a 0.32-cm sphere NBG-18 at 1090 K. The Tikhonov regularization was shown to provide a better estimation of the initial linear distribution than the CGLS and ART methods. The performance of the Tikhonov regularization was further examined with simulated constant, quartic, and exponential initial distributions. The Tikhonov regularization provided a reasonable recovery of the exponential profile, while the estimation of the linear, constant, and quartic profiles suffers from several issues.