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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.
L. A. El-Guebaly, H. Y. Khater
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 30 | Number 3 | December 1996 | Pages 1589-1593
Fusion Power Plants and Economics | doi.org/10.13182/FST96-A11963178
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Recent interest in the low aspect ratio (LAR) concept has led the U.S. ARIES team to examine the credibility of this advanced concept as a future source of fusion energy. The compactness of the LAR machine imposes severe constraints on the Cu center post (CP) which thus plays an important role in the design. In view of the fact that the machine operates for 40 y with a relatively high neutron wall loading of 4 MW/m2, the CP will be operating in a severe radiation environment for an extended period of time. The analysis indicated that the lifetime of the CP is limited by the Class C low level waste disposal requirements. Identification of potential radioactive waste problems for the Cu conductor has resulted in either limiting the lifetime of the unshielded CP to 0.12 FPY (corresponding to a fluence of 0.3 MWy/m2) or shielding the CP with 20-30 cm of shield. Since it is not feasible to replace hundreds of tonnes of Cu every 2 months, the CP should be shielded to prolong the lifetime to 4 years or more, reduce the cumulative radwaste and replacement cost, increase the system availability, and alleviate most of the CP radiation damage problems. We have assessed the effects of neutron fluence on conductor resistivity, swelling, and atomic displacement. Even though the radiation-induced swelling and changes to Cu resistivity due to transmutations are small at 0.3 MWy/m2, there is serious concern about the degradation of properties as all Cu alloys experience hardening and loss of ductility under neutron irradiation.
