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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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.
Brian M. Patterson, Kimberly A. DeFriend Obrey, George J. Havrilla, Abbas Nikroo, Haibo Huang
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 55 | Number 4 | May 2009 | Pages 417-423
Technical Paper | Eighteenth Target Fabrication Specialists' Meeting | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A7420
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Three-dimensional (3-D) computed micro X-ray tomography (micro CT) and 3-D confocal micro X-ray fluorescence (MXRF) combined are very useful nondestructive metrology techniques for determining the unique compositional and morphological information of fusion targets and target materials. Micro CT and confocal MXRF are being used in concert to examine a beryllium ablator capsule that has been sputtered and graded doped with copper and argon. In this manuscript, we will show that two-dimensional (2-D) MXRF imaging in concert with a simple radiograph is very useful for approximating the copper and argon profiles in the x and y dimensions, but because of the lack of signal discrimination in the z direction, image "bleed" from the sample regions where the X-rays are out of focus is prevalent. Data collected using the micro CT and overlapped with the confocal MXRF data produce absorbance and elemental line profiles without the signal bleed. Overlapping the 3-D data from these techniques provides a more accurate picture of the composition of these capsules than 2-D nondestructive techniques.