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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.
Yoshikazu Tamauchi, Takashi Miyata, Kazumi Takebe, Yoshiaki Hayashi, Shingo Matsuoka, Kazuya Hayashi, Katsuya Kurosu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 181 | Number 2 | February 2013 | Pages 303-316
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety/Reprocessing | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A15785
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In a reprocessing plant, the various and many accidents identified related to mechanical processes, chemical processes, and storage facilities have to be assessed to know the total risk of the plant. To assess the individual risks of so many potential accidents efficiently and effectively, we have developed a simplified quantitative method called quantitative safety assessment (QSA), based on our experience in probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) for the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant and with reference to the integrated safety analysis used in the United States for fuel cycle facilities. Our method not only includes such PRA features as quantifiability of the results and comparability of risk importance of the contributors to accident sequences but also offers the new features of simplified presentation and easy traceability. The designation of important safety structures, systems, components, and personnel activities is thus facilitated through the use of the results of this method. In this paper, the deployment of the QSA method is demonstrated using an example of a criticality accident in a plutonium partition process.
