ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
Standards Program
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Sep 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
October 2025
Latest News
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.
T. V. Krishnan
Nuclear Technology | Volume 49 | Number 1 | June 1980 | Pages 159-164
Technical Paper | Nuclear Power Reactor Safety / Instrument | doi.org/10.13182/NT80-A32517
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Intensities observed from any sample can be reduced to any desired matrix by using interference free off-peak background as an internal standard. The normalized count IN is given by (Ip/IB) X B’, where Ip and IB are observed peak and background counts and B’, the normalization factor, is the background in the desired matrix. After blank corrections, the relation between the concentration and the intensity is IN = kC (for low concentrations), log IN = a log C (for intermediate concentrations), and log IN = a log C -b(log C)2 (for high concentrations), except when B’ is too small or too large. Adjustment of B’ is equivalent to altering experimental conditions. The second-degree curve can also be linearized by plotting log IN = log IN + b(log C)2 versus log C, or (log IN/ log C) versus log C. Analysis can be done by evaluating a and b from two standards and solving for log C. Transformation of this second-degree equation to the Siedel-Lomakin type of curve, the use of x-ray fluorescence as an absolute method of analysis without standards, with only the unknown sample and two dilutions, and the modification of influence coefficient method of Rasberry and Heinrich to a binary form consisting of only the element of interest and the matrix, all showed that such a unified approach enables analysis of all types of samples with standards in any available matrix.
