Summary of the Forty-Fifth NCRP annual meeting on "the future of nuclear power worldwide: safety, health and the environment".

The role of nuclear power as a major resource in meeting the projected growth of electric power requirements in the United States and worldwide during the 21st century is a subject of great contemporary interest. The goal of the 2009 NCRP Annual Meeting was to provide a forum for an in-depth discussion of issues related to the safety, health and environmental protection aspects of new nuclear power reactor systems and related fuel-cycle facilities such as fuel production and reprocessing strategies. The meeting was an international conference with participation of almost 400 representatives from many nations, scientific organizations, nuclear industries, and governmental agencies engaged in the development and regulatory control of advanced nuclear reactor systems and fuel-cycle operations.

Comparison of hyperelastic models for granular materials.

Three recently proposed hyperelastic models for granular materials are compared with experiment data. Though all three are formulated to give elastic moduli that are power law functions of the mean stress, they have rather different dependencies on individual stresses, and generally differ from well established experimental forms. Predicted static stress distributions are in qualitative agreement with experiments, but do not differ greatly from isotropic linear elasticity, and similarly fail to account for variability in experiment data that presumably occurs due to a preparation dependence of granular materials.