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2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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Latest News
A year in orbit: ISS deployment tests radiation detectors for future space missions
The predawn darkness on a cool Florida night was shattered by the ignition of nine Merlin engines on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The thrust of the engines shook the ground miles away. From a distance, the rocket appeared to slowly rise above the horizon. For the cargo onboard, the launch was anything but gentle, as the ignition of liquid oxygen generated more than 1.5 million pounds of force. After the rocket had been out of sight for several minutes, the booster dramatically returned to Earth with several sonic booms in a captivating show of engineering designed to make space travel less expensive and more sustainable.
Chicago Local Section Event
March 28, 2024|7:00–8:00PM (8:00–9:00PM EDT)
Available to All Users
The ANS Chicago Section invites you to a presentation from Amanda Bachmann of Argonne National Laboratory about the impacts of deploying reactors fueled by High-Assay Low Enriched Uranium (HALEU).
The US is looking to deploy new reactor designs that will require HALEU fuel, which is needed by the current fleet of commercial reactors. Amanda's work models the deployment of select advanced reactors and the fuel cycle impacts of those deployments, as well as how decisions about those deployments affect the fuel cycle impacts. In addition, this work introduces a new method of dynamically modeling fuel depletion during a fuel cycle simulation.
Amanda is a postdoctoral researcher in the Reactor and Fuel Cycle Analysis Group at Argonne National Laboratory. Her work focuses on modeling, simulation, and software development for nuclear fuel cycle analysis. Previous work also includes modeling and simulation for nonproliferation safeguards applications. She holds a PhD in Nuclear, Plasma, Radiological Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2023), an MS (2020) and BS (2019) in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. In her free time, she enjoys crocheting, gymnastics, and playing with her rabbit, Little R.
