Meetings

Session Title: “ANS-8 Standards Forum”
Session Type: Discussion
Session Organizer: Doug Bowen (ORNL)
Summary: Subcommittee ANS-8, Operations with Fissile Material Outside Reactors, meets to discuss various technical and administrative aspects of the approximately 20 national consensus standards under its purview. In addition to status and progress updates by representatives of individual working groups, formal presentations on the technical bases of numerical values such as subcritical limits and experiences with applications of particular standards are solicited. Agenda topics such as new and expanded standards are also encouraged.

Session Title: “Recent Nuclear Criticality Safety Program Technical Accomplishments”
Session Type: Contributed Papers
Session Organizer: Lori Scott (SAIC)
Summary: The Nuclear Criticality Safety Program (NCSP) has been doing interesting technical work supporting the DOE criticality safety enterprise, as well as benefiting the nuclear community as a whole. There are few opportunities to learn about these efforts since they cannot all be presented at an ANS meeting. However, an NCSP Technical Seminar was held. The goal of this seminar was to have each NCSP Task Manager present their technical results from FY 2018. Specifically, the presentations provided a summary of: the work that was done; why the work was done; and who benefited from the work or could potentially benefit across the DOE as well as the nuclear complex. This led to an opportunity for the NCSP to showcase outstanding NCSP technical accomplishments and as a result, the best technical results that will have the most benefit to the nuclear community as a whole have been compiled and those presenters will provide these technical results at the 2019 ANS Winter Meeting.

Session Title: “Impacts to Criticality Safety from Recent Revisions to DOE Standards”
Session Type: Panel
Session Organizer: Kevin Kimball (CNS retd), John Miller (SNL), Andrew Prichard (PNNL)
Summary: Over the last couple of years, there have been several changes to DOE Orders and Standards that impact Nuclear Criticality Safety (NCS) practices (e.g., 420.1C, 3009, 3007). NCS programs across the complex are starting to implement these changes. This Panel session will have experts from various sites across the complex to discuss the basis and reasoning behind the changes, how these changes were/are being implemented and the lessons learned during implementation. The Panel will also explore any unintended consequences from these changes and if the expected benefits from these changes were realized.

Session Title: “Implications of NCS Analysis Process Drift”
Session Type: Panel
Session Organizer: Andrew Prichard (PNNL)
Summary: All new processes with fissionable material are evaluated for criticality safety before operations are started; a common problem is that with time the processes change. This panel session will discuss specific operations, the types of changes that have occurred, and the impact of process drift on the criticality safety. The focus of the panel session identify lessons learned and how they might apply to other organizations.

Session Title: “Critical and Subcritical Experiments”
Session Type: Contributed Papers
Session Organizer: Jesson Hutchinson (LANL)
Session LEAD sponsor: NNPD [not submitted by NCSD] Summary: Critical and subcritical experiments are performed every year to support a variety of national security missions, including nuclear nonproliferation, counter-proliferation, criticality safety research and development, nuclear emergency response, and a variety of hands-on training. Papers on critical and subcritical experiments (design, measurement, analysis, methods) will showcase current work in this area.

Session Title: “Introduction to NCSD Mentor Match”
Session Type: Discussion
Session Organizer: Deb Hill (UK NNL); Hannah Morbach (BWXT); Jennifer Alwin (LANL)
Summary: This session will describe the NCSD Mentor Match program, which leverages a modular framework to connect mentors and mentees based on past experience, desired skillsets, and communication preferences. NCSD Mentor Match allows participants to focus on areas such as calculational methods, conducting walkdowns, writing CSEs, responding to reviewer and/or regulator questions/comments, CAAS analysis, validation, in situ experiments, work/life balance, university teaching, hand calculations, presenting at ANS meetings, critical experiments, solution processing analysis, vault storage analysis, understanding ANS standards…to name a few. The program will also connect participants based on communication preferences and identify expectations for the program.

Session Title: “Data, Analysis and Operations in Nuclear Criticality Safety”
Session Type: Contributed Papers
Session Organizer: Theresa Cutler (LANL)
Confirmation Number: Summary: The purpose of this session is to provide a forum for timely presentation of general issues in the area of nuclear criticality safety that are not covered in other special session topics.
*likely 2 sessions based on number of papers submitted

The NCSD’s Third Annual Criticality Safety Design Competition was held during the 2019 ANS Winter Meeting at Washington D.C. All the winners were able to attend the Annual NCSD dinner.

The winners (and their pictures) are listed below:

1st place: Brandon Little – iPad

2nd place: Michael Fendler – One year paid ANS Membership

3rd place: Zachary Deziel

4th – 6th place (not in order): Michael Hua, Wei Eng and Noah Kleedtke

Stay tuned, maybe we’ll have another one next year!