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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!
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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.
Tadas Kaliatka, Eugenijus Uspuras, Algirdas Kaliatka
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 72 | Number 2 | August 2017 | Pages 176-187
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1320496
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An event of water coolant ingress into the vacuum vessel (VV) is one of the most important events leading to severe consequences in nuclear fusion reactors. The ingress of coolant to the VV could appear due to coolant pipe rupture of in-vessel components. Any damage of in-vessel components could lead to water ingress and may lead to pressure increase and possible damage of the VV. Therefore, it is important to understand thermohydraulic processes in the VV during the ingress of coolant event (ICE) to prevent overpressurization of the VV. This technical note updates the developed Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) model in accordance with the experience gained from the modeling of ICE experiments. Calculation results using the updated model are compared with the results obtained using an older model and the results of other researchers. The calculation results of the updated W7-X model show a much smaller pressure increase rate in the VV compared to the old model. In order to find the maximal area of partial break, which increases pressure in the VV but does not reach burst disk activation pressure (no steam release from the VV to the environment), the best-estimate approach is provided. The results of the analysis reveal that partial break using the updated W7-X model could be much bigger than what was considered before.