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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Fusion Science and Technology
October 2025
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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.
Joharimanitra Randrianandraina, Manuel Grivet, Christophe Ramseyer, Jean-Emmanuel Groetz, Bruno Cardey, Freddy Torrealba Anzola, Didier Ducret, Caroline Chambelland
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 77 | Number 1 | January 2021 | Pages 19-25
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1842680
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work is motivated by the results obtained during a study on the tritiated water adsorbed in zeolite [L. Frances et al., J. Phys. Chem. C, 119, 28462 (2015)]. The decomposition of water by radiolysis leads to the production of dioxygen and dihydrogen as main stable products. By studying the evolution of their quantities of matter, one can note an increase in a first stage, followed by a decrease after a few hundred days of storage until complete disappearance. This interesting process depends on the water loading ratios, expressed in mass percentage, lying between 4%, and 19%; such a phenomenon is not observed in saturated zeolite. Our goal is to determine, through numerical simulations, how this disappearance, which is associated with the recombination of the radiolysis products, occurs by making a microscopic study on the adsorption of H2O, H2, and O2 molecules on 4A zeolite (Z4A). Computational physics is useful to understand the effects of molecule adsorption on its structure and also to closely examine the molecule-zeolite and molecule-molecule interactions. Indeed, different simulation methods are used from static to dynamic studies employing both quantum and classical tools with the periodical structure of Z4A. To summarize, the adsorption of molecules from the radiolysis of water are studied according to different points of view (quantum and classical) using various numerical simulation tools, such as density functional theory for ab initio structural optimization and energy calculation, Monte Carlo to study the distribution of the adsorbed molecules in the zeolite, and molecular dynamics to follow the evolution of the system (molecule + zeolite) over time depending on the temperature, in order to extract as much information as possible (structurally, statistically, energy, electronically) to understand the main problematic of this work: How do stable molecules issued from radiolysis recombine in Z4A?