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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.
Bret Patrick van den Akker, Joonhong Ahn
Nuclear Technology | Volume 181 | Number 3 | March 2013 | Pages 408-426
Technical Papers | Fission Reactors/Fuel Cycle and Management/Radioactive Waste Management and Disposal | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-103
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents a deterministic performance assessment for spent fuel from deep-burn modular high-temperature reactors (DBMHRs) in the proposed Yucca Mountain repository. Typical DBMHR designs utilize fuel elements manufactured from graphite. The fuel itself is made of TRISO particles containing the fissile material. The performance of the DBMHR spent fuel (DBSF) was evaluated in terms of the annual dose to the reasonably maximally exposed individual (RMEI) under various hydrogeological conditions. Part of this evaluation was an analysis of the graphite waste matrix and of the TRISO particles under repository conditions, the result of which indicates that the lifetime of the graphite matrix greatly exceeds that of the TRISO particles and that it is the graphite, not the TRISO particles, that serves to sequester the radionuclides within the fuel matrix. Under all 14 cases considered, DBSF is seen to comply with the annual dose standards set in Part 197 of Title 40 of the Code of Federal Regulations, for exposure via groundwater contamination under current climatic conditions. Parametric studies for the effect of waste matrix lifetime on annual dose received by the RMEI indicate that repository performance is sensitively linked to waste matrix durability because most radionuclides including actinides are likely to be released congruently with the graphite matrix.
