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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!
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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.
Nicolas Woolstenhulme, Clint Baker, Colby Jensen, Daniel Chapman, Devin Imholte, Nate Oldham, Connie Hill, Spencer Snow
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 10 | October 2019 | Pages 1251-1265
Critical Review | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1590072
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Transient Reactor Test facility (TREAT) resumed operations in 2017 in order to reclaim its crucial role in nuclear-heated fuel safety research. TREAT’s historic era of operation (1959 to 1994) was best known for integral-scale testing of large fuel specimens/bundles under postulated reactor plant accident conditions, but TREAT also supported smaller-scale phenomena identification tests that elucidated fundamental behaviors and paved the way for these integral-scale tests. Advances in modern computational capabilities and a resurgence of interest in novel reactor technologies have created an opportunity for emphasizing modernized science-based and separate effects tests once again at TREAT. An innovative approach to this type of testing has been developed to leverage minor radioactivity built in during brief TREAT irradiations by arranging smaller fuel specimens in low-activation hardware so that they can be easily extracted and shipped for postirradiation examination within weeks. This recently established capability, termed the Minimal Activation Retrievable Capsule Holder (MARCH) irradiation vehicle system, includes capabilities for cost-effective simplified environment testing of centimeter-scale fuel samples of various geometries, temperature-controlled irradiations of millimeter-size samples for lower-length-scale model development, liquid metal–bonded heat sink capsules for controlling transient temperature response in fuel rodlets, and an innovative approach to high-throughput irradiation of transient sensors and instrumentation. The MARCH system’s capabilities will also set the foundation for fuel safety research performed in larger integral-scale test devices with coolant environments representing reactor plants. Based upon historic approaches, but modernized to meet current nuclear technology needs, these larger irradiation devices include flowing pressurized water (including the ability to depressurize to steam) as well liquid metal cooling loops for various fuel rod and small bundle specimens. This critical review describes the recently established MARCH system and current trajectory to enabling advanced transient science with a suite of irradiation test devices.
