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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.
Ralph Cooper
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 13 | Number 4 | August 1962 | Pages 355-365
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE62-A26177
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Critical sizes are determined for a variety of fast assemblies appropriate for nuclear rocket reactors. These are based on cores of UO2-W cermets or UC-metal carbide solid solutions reflected by beryllium. Rocket reactors weighing as little as 200 lb are possible, and, in larger sizes, either high power density or high exit gas temperature can be achieved. The fast spectrum allows the use of the most refractory materials (such as HfC) in bulk to obtain high performance. Use of U233in place of U235 can lead to substantial improvements in reactor weight, specific power, and/or temperature capability at the cost of the radiation associated with U233. The core sizes are generally quite small, which is valuable where shielding may be significant. Nuclear aspects, including control, uranium investment, power distribution, and reflector materials, are briefly discussed.