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Division Spotlight
Isotopes & Radiation
Members are devoted to applying nuclear science and engineering technologies involving isotopes, radiation applications, and associated equipment in scientific research, development, and industrial processes. Their interests lie primarily in education, industrial uses, biology, medicine, and health physics. Division committees include Analytical Applications of Isotopes and Radiation, Biology and Medicine, Radiation Applications, Radiation Sources and Detection, and Thermal Power Sources.
Meeting Spotlight
Conference on Nuclear Training and Education: A Biennial International Forum (CONTE 2025)
February 3–6, 2025
Amelia Island, FL|Omni Amelia Island Resort
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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Christmas Night
Twas the night before Christmas when all through the houseNo electrons were flowing through even my mouse.
All devices were plugged in by the chimney with careWith the hope that St. Nikola Tesla would share.
Xia Bing, Jiong Guo, Chunlin Wei, Ding She, Jian Zhang, Fu Li (Tsinghua Univ)
Proceedings | 16th International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management Conference (IHLRWM 2017) | Charlotte, NC, April 9-13, 2017 | Pages 848-852
The pebble bed high temperature reactors (PB-HTRs) are one of the promising reactor types for the next generation nuclear systems. Some intrinsic features of the PB-HTRs’ spherical fuel element embedded with the TRISO coated fuel particles bring high proliferation-resistance to the PB-HTR spent fuel storage, including the continuous on-line fueling strategy, the difficulty of processing TRISO particles, the low heavy metal density in the fuel pebbles and the high depletion of plutonium. The material accountancy concept and methodology of PB-HTR spent fuel storage are proposed in this work. For PB-HTRs, the spent fuel storage should be treated as an item facility; however, the items in PB-HTR spent fuel storage are the spent fuel containers, instead of the spent fuel assemblies in conventional PWR’s spent fuel storage. The accountancy of nuclear material should be implemented by evaluating the average burnup value of a batch of spent fuels. For the equilibrium core of PB-HTR, the average burnup value of a batch of spent fuel pebbles is determined by the integral power during the period when these pebbles are unloaded from the reactor core. Furthermore, the burnup value of each spent fuel pebble can also be measured by gamma spectroscopy upon the long-lived fission product 137Cs. After evaluating the spent fuel burnup, the dependency of the amounts of heavy metal nuclides upon the burnup value of a spent fuel pebble is estimated by the depletion calculations. It is revealed that the non-proliferation features of PB-HTR spent fuel storage is excellent and the accountancy methodology proposed in this work is feasible. Besides the high safety features, the high proliferation-resistance can be another attraction of the PB-HTRs.