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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.
Yu Huang, Gaofeng Lu, Youshi Zeng, Nan Qian, Xinxin Chu, Guanghua Wang, Shengwei Wu, Wei Liu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 3 | March 2020 | Pages 458-466
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1633156
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Since the Pd/Ag membrane has a permselectivity for hydrogen isotopes, a permeator with a Pd/Ag membrane is developed to separate tritium from inert gases. First, a permeation experiment of pure H2 was carried out to determine the pressure exponent and the rate-determining step of permeation. It was found that the diffusion of H2 through the Pd membrane was the rate-determining step. Then, the separation of H2 from H2-Ar gas mixtures was carried out on the permeator to simulate the separation of tritium. Moreover, numerical simulation was utilized to study the concentration distribution of H2 in the permeator. The permeability of the Pd/Ag membrane was determined comparing the simulation results with the experimental data. The permeation flux of H2 through the Pd/Ag membrane is affected by permeability, the volume fraction of Ar in the feed gas, and the flow rate of the feed gas. In the condition of high permeability and Ar volume fraction, a phenomenon known as concentration polarization occurred. It can strongly affect the permeation of H2. Based on these results, an optimized design of the Pd/Ag permeator can be made to effectively separate tritium from other gases.
