ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Sep 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
October 2025
Latest News
NN Asks: What did you learn from ANS’s Nuclear 101?
Mike Harkin
When ANS first announced its new Nuclear 101 certificate course, I was excited. This felt like a course tailor-made for me, a transplant into the commercial nuclear world. I enrolled for the inaugural session held in November 2024, knowing it was going to be hard (this is nuclear power, of course)—but I had been working on ramping up my knowledge base for the past year, through both my employer and at a local college.
The course was a fast-and-furious roller-coaster ride through all the key components of the nuclear power industry, in one highly challenging week. In fact, the challenges the students experienced caught even the instructors by surprise. Thankfully, the shared intellectual stretch we students all felt helped us band together to push through to the end.
We were all impressed with the quality of the instructors, who are some of the top experts in the field. We appreciated not only their knowledge base but their support whenever someone struggled to understand a concept.
H. W. Xu, C. S. Alford, J. C. Cooley, L. A. Dixon, R. E. Hackenberg, S. A. Letts, K. A. Moreno, A. Nikroo, J. R. Wall, K. P. Youngblood
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 51 | Number 4 | May 2007 | Pages 547-552
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST51-547
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Various morphologies have been observed in sputter-deposited Be ablator capsules, including nodular growth, cone growth and twisted grain growth. By devising an agitation method that includes both bouncing and rolling the spherical mandrels during deposition, and by reducing the coating rate, consistent columnar grain structure has now been obtained up to 170 mm. Low mode deformation of the shells is observed on thin CH mandrels, but is suppressed if stiffer mandrels are used. Ablator density measured by weighing and x-ray radiography is 93%.95% of bulk density of Be. Transmission electron microscopy shows 100.200 nm size voids in the film and striations inside the grains. Be shells produced with rolling agitation have met most of the NIF specifications. Some of the few remaining issues will be discussed.
