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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.
A. Querol, S. Gallardo, J. Ródenas, G. Verdú
Nuclear Technology | Volume 175 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 63-72
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the 16th Biennial Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division / Radiation Transport and Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A12271
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Quality control of mammography units is necessary to reduce the dose imparted to women as much as possible. Accurate characterization of the primary X-ray spectra is very useful for this purpose. Obtaining primary spectra normally involves the use of unfolding methods to be applied to pulse-height distributions (PHDs) measured in detector devices. In this work, the modified truncated singular value decomposition, the damped singular value decomposition, and the Tikhonov unfolding methods have been applied to several PHDs simulated with the Monte Carlo code MCNP5. The main goal of this paper is to test the capability of these unfolding methods to reproduce different primary spectra, corresponding to several high voltages and to the different anode materials molybdenum and rhodium. With this aim, an MCNP5 model has been developed to reproduce an actual experimental measurement including the X-ray focus, a Compton spectrometer, and a silicon detector. Quality parameters, such as the half-value layer, homogeneity factor, mean energy, and transmission curve, have been evaluated to see the effect of discrepancies observed between unfolded and theoretical spectra.