ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Sep 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
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.
Robert C. Cook
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 41 | Number 3 | May 2002 | Pages 155-163
Technical Paper | Fourteenth Target Fabrication Specialists' Meeting | doi.org/10.13182/FST02-A17893
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The sound speed in a Be grain is markedly different in orthogonal directions due to an anisotropic Young’s modulus. The impact of this fact on ICF capsules machined from multi-crystalline Be is not clear, but is of concern if the shock velocity is likewise grain orientation dependent. In this paper the expected inner wall break out profile due to grain affected shock velocity variations is calculated for a Be capsule, as a function of the grain size and effective shock velocity anisotropy factor factor p = v‖ / v⊥, where v‖ and v⊥ are the effective maximum and minimum orthogonal shock speeds in a grain. In this simple model it is assumed that grain boundaries have no effect other than to mark the location where the shock speed changes as it moves from one grain to another. The grain structure of bulk beryllium is modeled by randomly placing N points in a volume V to define Wigner-Seitz cells (grains) of average volume V/N. Each grain is given a random orientation. The spherical shell wall is modeled by a 150 µm thick planar slab of this multi-crystalline material, 2πR in length where R is the capsule radius, taken to be 1000 pm. The slab is sampled at 3600 points along its 2πR length, at each point the average shock velocity through the sample is determined based on the model slab grain structure at that point. This data is used to create the expected spatial breakout profile, which is then Fourier transformed to give a power spectral representation that is compared to the current outside surface design specification. In order to match the design specification, grain diameters less than 10 pm and an effective shock velocity anisotropy, p, of less than 1.001 are necessary.