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Workshop for Applied Nuclear Data Activities (WANDA) 2026

→ US/Eastern
Hilton Arlington National Landing, 2399 Richmond Hwy, Arlington, VA, 22202

Hilton Arlington National Landing, 2399 Richmond Hwy, Arlington, VA, 22202
Ellen O'Brien (Los Alamos National Laboratory), Stephanie Lyons (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)
Description

Nonproliferation and Safeguards for Advanced Reactors

Session Chairs:ย Mark Croce (LANL), Tomi Akindele (LLNL), Ramkumar Venkataraman (ORNL)

NDWG POCs:ย Jennifer Jo Ressler (LLNL), David Matters (LBL), Ramkumar Venkataraman (ORNL)

The WANDA Nonproliferation and Safeguards for Advanced Reactors session will explore emerging challenges and opportunities in ensuring material control and verification across evolving reactor technologies and fuel cycles. This session will highlight the nuclear data, measurements, simulation methodology and detector response models needed to understand the proliferation potential of various advanced fuel cycle systems and apply appropriate safeguards. Participants form stakeholders representing safeguards measurement technology developers, national and international regulatory perspectives, and reactor developers will examine how safeguards can adapt to new reactor concepts, emphasizing the importance of nuclear data, integral benchmarks, and detector characterization.

Creating an Inventory Sub-Library

Session Chairs: Richard Saldanha (PNNL), Andre Sieverding (LLNL)ย 

NDWG POCs:ย David Brown (BNL), Pat Griffin (SNL)

A nuclear sub-library for inventory, activation, or dosimetry contains the nuclear data for processes that generally change the isotopic composition (transmutation) and lead to radioactive products as well as the reactions on the radioactive products themselves and their decay. In recent years, the development of fast-neutron reactor concepts, advances in fusion energy, and other applications have increased the need for extending and improving the nuclear data for inventory calculations, which are crucial to assess the safety of reactors, predict radioactive waste classification, or validate experimental testing data. Among the emerging needs is not only the increased coverage of radioactive isotopes but also charged-particle reactions and higher incident energies. The goal of this session is to clearly establish the user requirements for a useful inventory sub-library and outline the path forward on how to establish, improve and validate a nuclear data library for inventory application with dedicated experiments, advances in reaction theory and computation and data infrastructure.โ€‹

Mapping out the Path to the Next-Generation of Nuclear Fission Data

Session Chairs:ย Jack Silano (LLNL), Will Wieselquist (ORNL), Brian Kiedrowski (U. Michigan)

NDWG POCs:ย Todd Bredeweg (LANL), Kay Kolos McCubbin (LLNL), Patrick Talou (Stardust Science Labs)

The aim of this session is to develop a prioritized list of activities necessary to deploy predictive fission-related nuclear data, including continuous-energy representations of independent fission product yields, neutron-gamma-fragment correlations, photofission, and their covariances in representations that can be readily distributed and utilized for applications. Discussion topics include: needs of the end-users, opportunities for using existing measurements or new ones that can be performed in the near term, gaps and improvements in fission theory and computational modeling, and innovations in fission data formats and evaluation pipelines.

AI/ML for Nuclear Data: Opportunities and Challenges

Session Chairs:ย Mike Grosskopf (LANL), Nicolas Schunck (LLNL), Carlos Soto (BNL)ย 

NDWG POCs:ย Nathan Gibson (LANL), Robert Casperson (LLNL)

The aim of this session is to explore the current and future role of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) techniques in nuclear data. AI/ML has the potential to revolutionize how we produce, process and use nuclear data. AI techniques that are already making a direct impact in the nuclear data pipeline include Bayesian statistics for uncertainty quantification and propagation, supervised learning techniques to build surrogate models, and physics-informed AI. Upcoming technologies based on Large Language Models, AI agents or embodied AI will provide additional opportunities to accelerate and strengthen the whole nuclear data pipeline. The session will feature an overview of the current, fast-changing landscape in AI/ML as well as several short talks by machine-learning researchers to highlight specific topics of potential interest.

Instrumentation and Facilities for Nuclear Data

Session Chairs:ย Peter Brain (LANL), Darren Bleuel (LLNL), Dave Matters (LBL)

NDWG POCs:ย Lee Bernstein (LBL), Jesse Brown (ORNL)

In terms of facilities and instrumentation, the US ND community has many capabilities and needs. One of the goals of this session is to discuss experimental facilities currently available in the US that can be used for ND developments which impact various federal missions. Another goal of this session is to discuss instrumentation and facility needs which are required to progress ND efforts, and how investing in those facilities would impact relevant mission space for US programs. This session will cover a wide variety of differential and integral measurements for ND reactions and structure investigations and will support the development of reference documentation for US ND facilities.โ€‹
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LunchDeck_Mon.pptx
LunchDeck_Tues.pptx
Poster Session 1
Poster Session 2
Lisa Felker