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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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.
M. Wimmers, P. Pohl
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 97 | Number 1 | September 1987 | Pages 53-57
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE87-A23495
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In collaboration with Kernforschungsanlage Jülich, Federal Republic of Germany, and other companies, dynamic experiments have been carried out with the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Versuchsreaktor (A VR) to test advanced dynamic computer models with the goal of using low-enriched uranium (LEU) fuel in future high-temperature gas-cooled reactors. Since LEU fuel has been used for the AVR since 1982, both experimental and theoretical behavior has been studied during the changeover from highly enriched uranium to LEU. The experiments comprise fast power transients that are initiated by either a fast control rod movement or a fast change of coolant flow. The neutron flux and other important parameters are registered in suitable time expansion. To prevent the cantilevered segments of the carbon brick core ceiling from being exposed to unallowable high-temperature gradients, the rod movements are restricted to limit the reactivity variation to ∼ 60 mNile. For the coolant flow transients, the blower speed is usually reduced from 100 to 50%, and then elevated again to 80% after 30 min. A return to 100% is not possible because of the overshoot of the neutron flux. Also, in some experiments the speed is reduced to 80%, after which the core remains under the control of xenon influence for ≈1 day.