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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.
13th Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control & Human-Machine Interface Technologies (NPIC&HMIT 2023)
Technical Session|Panel
Tuesday, July 18, 2023|3:15–5:00PM EDT|300B
Session Chairs:
Chris Cook (NRC)
Ted Quinn (Paragon Energy Solutions)
Session Organizers:
The nuclear industry is developing a number of digital systems for application in modernized operating reactors, SMRs, and new/advanced nuclear power reactors. Instrumentation and controls associated with these systems play an important role in the safety and security of these reactors. Increased use of sensors could lead to improved monitoring and diagnostics, with the promise of reducing the need for shiftly surveillance and operator rounds without decreasing safety. Such sensors could also be combined with modern tools such as AI/ML, that hold promise of reducing O&M costs and anticipating issues before turning into costly outages. However, misleading or incorrect data from these same sensors could lead to false confidence or lower reliability during off-normal situations when their information is needed most. Cybersecurity is also a concern, especially if these sensors transmit data wirelessly. Multiple designers and vendors are in various stages of the technology curve extending from cutting-edge research at national laboratories/universities to mature systems that have completed review by a nuclear regulator. This session seeks to discuss perspectives on these research activities, including barriers and challenges to use/licensing, from panelists at all stages along the technology curve. This session will also discuss research activities currently underway, including anticipated research products and development timelines, as well as regulatory research underway in parallel that seeks to develop a solid technical bases to support timely and predictable safety & security reviews when these new systems are submitted to a nuclear regulator for application and use.
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