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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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.
Douglas E. Peplow, Thomas M. Miller, Bruce W. Patton, John C. Wagner
Nuclear Technology | Volume 182 | Number 1 | April 2013 | Pages 63-74
Technical Paper | Radiation Transport and Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A15827
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The potential for smuggling special nuclear material (SNM) into the United States is a major concern to homeland security, so federal agencies are investigating a variety of preventive measures, including detection and interdiction of SNM during transport. One approach for SNM detection, called active interrogation, uses a radiation source, such as a beam of neutrons or photons, to scan cargo containers and detect the products of induced fissions. In realistic cargo transport scenarios, the process of inducing and detecting fissions in SNM is difficult due to the presence of various and potentially thick materials between the radiation source and the SNM and the practical limitations on radiation source strength and detection capabilities. Therefore, computer simulations are being used, along with experimental measurements, in efforts to design effective active interrogation detection systems. The computer simulations primarily consist of simulating radiation transport from the source to the detector region(s). Although the Monte Carlo method is predominantly used for these simulations, difficulties persist related to calculating statistically meaningful detector responses in practical computing times, thereby limiting their usefulness for design and evaluation of practical active interrogation systems. In previous work, the benefits of hybrid methods that use the results of approximate deterministic transport calculations to accelerate high-fidelity Monte Carlo simulations have been demonstrated for source-detector-type problems. In this work, hybrid methods are applied and evaluated for three example active interrogation problems. Additionally, a new approach is presented that uses multiple goal-based importance functions depending on a particle's relevance to the ultimate goal of the simulation. Results from the examples demonstrate that the application of hybrid methods to active interrogation simulations dramatically increases their calculational efficiency.