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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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ANS continues to expand its certificate offerings
It’s almost been a full year since the American Nuclear Society held its inaugural section of Nuclear 101, a comprehensive certificate course on the basics of the nuclear field. Offered at the 2024 ANS Winter Conference and Expo, that first sold-out course marked a massive milestone in the Society’s expanding work in professional development and certification.
Aniruddha Kumar, R. B. Bhatt, Mohd. Afzal, J. P. Panakkal, Dhruba J. Biswas, J. Padma Nilaya, A. K. Das
Nuclear Technology | Volume 182 | Number 2 | May 2013 | Pages 242-247
Regular Technical Paper | Special Issue on the Symposium on Radiation Effects in Ceramic Oxide and Novel LWR Fuels / Decontamination/Decommissioning | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A16434
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Decontamination of fuel pins is an important process step in nuclear fuel fabrication. Decontamination assumes greater significance with respect to fuels containing plutonium, owing to both plutonium's high radiotoxicity arising from its long biological half-life and its relatively short radioactive half-life. The advantages of using a laser to decontaminate such radioactive surfaces over conventional cleaning techniques are well recognized. This paper describes detailed process optimization and field implementation of laser-assisted decontamination of fuel pins of the Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR). A short-pulsed Nd-YAG laser has been effectively used to decontaminate the fuel pins by exposing their outer surface to laser radiation of an appropriate fluence. The laser parameters were controlled to achieve the required cleaning without causing any clad surface damage. Achievement of such was confirmed by evaluating the laser-cleaned surface using scanning electron microscopy, chemical composition studies by electron probe microanalysis, and Vicker's microhardness test.