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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.
R. C. Kern, M. T. Hsu
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 68 | Number 1 | October 1978 | Pages 141-143
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE78-A27282
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One difficulty in using the RELAP4 code is that, owing to the overspecification of the volume and junction input data for the initial conditions, a residual friction term must be defined to establish steady-state conditions. If the corresponding residual friction coefficient is out of allowable range, the calculation is terminated at the initial data checking phase. An allowable residual friction coefficient is added to the form loss coefficient and is used throughout the transient calculation. This might affect the results if the residual friction coefficient is large. However, to model a system represented by a large number of volumes and junctions, manual adjustment of the input data, such as the pressure distribution, to reduce the effect of residual terms can take a significant amount of engineering time. A procedure that allows the code to do the adjustment internally is described in this Note.