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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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August 2025
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The newest era of workforce development at ANS
As most attendees of this year’s ANS Annual Conference left breakfast in the Grand Ballroom of the Chicago Downtown Marriott to sit in on presentations covering everything from career pathways in fusion to recently digitized archival nuclear films, 40 of them made their way to the hotel’s fifth floor to take part in the second offering of Nuclear 101, a newly designed certification course that seeks to give professionals who are in or adjacent to the industry an in-depth understanding of the essentials of nuclear energy and engineering from some of the field’s leading experts.
V. O’Donnell, T. Keya, A. Romans, G. Harvill, M. Andurkar, B. C. Prorok, S. M. Thompson, J. Gahl
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 2 | February 2023 | Pages 254-260
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2120321
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Experimentally characterizing radioactive materials can be time consuming and expensive. This is mainly due to the size requirements of inspected specimens. Due to the growing interest in using additively manufactured components in next-generation reactors, there is an urgent need to develop new accelerated testing techniques with regard to characterizing radiation damage. This will ensure a more timely certification of the unique material structures inherent to additively manufactured parts. In this study, we investigate a means to reduce the time investment, and thus the human exposure to radioactive specimens in need of experimental characterization. We determine the feasibility of using ultra-small specimens in lieu of much larger specimens to characterize bulk material properties before and after irradiation. Experiments were conducted to investigate this technique and compare it to conventional bulk irradiations and characterization activities. It was found that discernable radiation damage existed in the ultra-small specimens even after relatively short neutron irradiation times. The results also demonstrate decreased radiation hardening in additive manufactured Inconel 625 material relative to its wrought forms.