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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.
Milton Ash, Richard Bellman, Robert Kalaba
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 6 | Number 2 | August 1959 | Pages 152-156
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE59-A25646
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
After a high-flux thermal nuclear reactor is shut down, the concentration of fission product xenon may rise for many hours as a result of the decay of fission product iodine into Xe135. This results in reactor poisoning and may, with consequent loss of efficiency, postpone the time at which the reactor may be restarted. This poisoning may be minimized by carefully controlling the rate at which the neutron flux is decreased during the shut-down operation. The determination of optimal control in this situation leads to some nonclassical problems in the calculus of variations. The aim of this paper is to show how they can be treated by the functional equation technique of dynamic programming. The methods we present rely upon the use of high-speed digital computers with large memories. The method automatically produces a valuable parameter study and results in stable designs.
