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.
Leo A. Lawrence
Nuclear Technology | Volume 64 | Number 2 | February 1984 | Pages 139-153
Technical Paper | Nuclear Fuel | doi.org/10.13182/NT84-A33337
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The character and extent of fuel/cladding chemical interaction (FCCI) have been established for mixed uranium-plutonium oxide, (U,Pu)O2, fuels irradiated in Experimental Breeder Reactor-II to peak fuel burnups to 14.5 at.% at beginning-of-life peak cladding temperatures to 730°C. The changes in character and the correlation of depth of FCCI were determined as functions of the initial as-fabricated fuel oxygen-to-metal ratios (O/M), the cladding inner surface temperature, and fuel burnup. The character of the interaction and its evolution with burnup and temperatures were consistent with oxidation of the chromium in the stainless steel cladding under the influence of fission products. A statistically based design wastage correlation was developed for depth of interaction based on the largest set of fuel pin data for FCCI in the U.S. program drawn from well-characterized and carefully controlled tests. The resultant correlation, linear in burnup, O/M, and cladding temperature, includes a factor for the level of confidence to use in application of the equation in design. The correlation accounted for the few instances, i.e., 3%, that were encountered of deep localized cladding interaction. Significant changes were also noted in the interaction in the cladding opposite the top fuel pellet and the first UO2 insulator pellet. Comparisons to the limited Phénix data available showed the correlation adequately accounted for FCCI in large breeder fuel pins.
