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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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.
S. C. Wilson, S. R. Biegalski, R. L. Coats
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 157 | Number 3 | November 2007 | Pages 344-353
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE06-28
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The primary shutdown mechanism of all-metal nuclear assemblies engaging in pulsed operations is thermal expansion of the fuel material. Typically, a fuel temperature coefficient of reactivity is acquired by building the apparatus and fitting the operational data to the Nordheim-Fuchs kinetics equations. This value may vary as a function of reactivity insertion because of thermomechanical effects in the fuel material, which leads to uncertainty regarding untested reactor designs. This paper presents a computational method for modeling power, temperature, and thermoelastic displacement behavior of a spherical Godiva-like assembly during a prompt supercritical excursion and provides a way of determining fuel temperature coefficients of reactivity without the use of operational data.
