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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.
J. G. Moore, R. H. Rainey
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 11 | Number 3 | November 1961 | Pages 278-284
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE61-A26004
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Laboratory experiments have demonstrated the chemical feasibility of incorporating soluble salts of the neutron poisons boron, cadmium, samarium, and gadolinium in solutions associated with the processing of Consolidated Edison reactor fuel (stainless steel-clad 96% ThO2-4% highly enriched UO2). At room temperature at least 0.3 M boron or neutron cross section equivalent is soluble in the 6 M H2SO4 decladding solution or Thorex dissolvent (13 M HNO3-0.04 M F-0.1 M Al(NO3)3. None of the poisons were volatilized to a significant extent (i.e., <6%) during evaporation for fuel adjustment. Distribution coefficients obtained in batch extraction tests indicated low extraction of these nuclear poisons from nitrate solutions by TBP in Amsco. Single-cycle countercurrent batch extractions with the acid Thorex flowsheet, which uses 30% TBP, gave decontamination factors from uranium for boron, cadmium, and rare earths of ≧1 × 104, > 1.5 × 103, and > 104, respectively. Countercurrent batch extractions with 2.5% TBP in Amsco resulted in concentrations of boron, rare earths, and cadmium in the uranium product which were at the limits of analytical detection, i.e., 2.5, <4, and <17 ppm, respectively. Two cycles of extraction should decrease the concentration of the nuclear poisons to acceptable levels for fuel recycle.