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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.
J. Toman, C. Sisemore, R. Terhune
Nuclear Technology | Volume 27 | Number 4 | December 1975 | Pages 640-652
Technical Paper | Nuclear Explosive | doi.org/10.13182/NT75-A24338
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A major instrumentation program undertaken in the Rio Blanco experiment involved the burial of 20 accelerometers and 16 velocity gauges at varying depths from the ground surface and distances from the emplacement well. The objective was to measure the extent of spall (tensile failure of the earth materials). A preliminary analysis of the accelerometer data indicates that the Rio Blanco spall zone can be described as a broad shallow dish with a most probable depth of <350 ft and a radius of <24 000 ft. Spalled material experiences a period of free fall (-1-g acceleration) that can be identified in both acceleration and velocity traces. Acceleration records show conclusively that spall occurred above 149 ft at the emplacement well, but not below 604 ft. Instruments placed at depths of 350 and 450 ft appear not to have recorded spall characteristics, but these records must be analyzed in greater detail for a definitive statement. The results are in general agreement with predetonation predictions.