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.
Division Spotlight
Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
Meeting Spotlight
Conference on Nuclear Training and Education: A Biennial International Forum (CONTE 2025)
February 3–6, 2025
Amelia Island, FL|Omni Amelia Island Resort
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
Jan 2025
Jul 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
February 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
How to talk about nuclear
In your career as a professional in the nuclear community, chances are you will, at some point, be asked (or volunteer) to talk to at least one layperson about the technology you know and love. You might even be asked to present to a whole group of nonnuclear folks, perhaps as a pitch to some company tangential to your company’s business. So, without further ado, let me give you some pointers on the best way to approach this important and surprisingly complicated task.
G. Kistner and J. T. Mihalczo
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 35 | Number 1 | January 1969 | Pages 27-44
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE69-A21112
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A series of static critical experiments has been performed on an accurate mockup of the SORA Reactor. SORA is a proposed NaK cooled, repetitively pulsed fast reactor which would be used as a high-intensity neutron source for time-of-flight experiments. The reactivity of this reactor is varied by a movable reflector. Those parameters which are related to the kinetics of the reactor have been investigated thoroughly in the critical experiments. They have been measured for both beryllium and iron reflectors of several sizes and for various core and fixed reflector configurations. The total reactivity of the movable reflectors varied from $3.7 for a 11.0-cm-wide iron reflector to $12 for a 26.2-cm-wide beryllium reflector. The reactivity of the movable reflector as a function of its position has been shown to have a parabolic dependence on position characterized by the parameter αx, which varied from 4 to 9.9¢/cm2. The prompt-neutron time decay is described by a fast decay constant which varied between 0.30 and 0.55/µ sec and a slow decay constant which varied between 0.05 and 0.10/µ sec. The critical mass for the various experiments was between 50.3 and 57.3 kg of uranium enriched to 93.2 wt% 235U. Using space-independent neutron kinetics with one delayed-neutron group, it has been shown that with a 24-cm-high × 7-cm-thick × 21-cm-wide beryllium reflector the assembly will produce 100 pulses/sec ∼50-µsec wide at half-maximum power with a peak-to-average power ratio of ∼180.