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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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
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Nuclear Technology
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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.
Hatice Akkurt
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 8 | August 2023 | Pages 1215-1228
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2023.2196234
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Neutron absorber materials are used in spent fuel pool (SFP) storage racks to increase storage capacity while maintaining criticality safety margins. BORAL is the most commonly used neutron absorber material in SFPs in the United States and is used in many countries, including England, Mexico, Korea, and Taiwan. This paper presents the results from an analysis of neutron absorber panels that were removed from an operating SFP. These panels provide very valuable data points due to their age and unique history since they represent rack modules that were placed in two separate SFPs. Given their history and service time, these neutron absorber panels mostly bound the absorber panels within the industry.
