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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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.
Michael Philip Short, Ronald George Ballinger
Nuclear Technology | Volume 177 | Number 3 | March 2012 | Pages 366-381
Technical Paper | Nuclear Plant Operations and Control | doi.org/10.13182/NT12-A13481
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A material system that resists lead-bismuth attack and retains its strength at very high temperatures has been developed that enables increased outlet temperature and the promise of allowing increased coolant velocity and efficiency of lead- and lead-bismuth-cooled reactors if the behavior reported here is confirmed by long-term tests. The development of this system represents an enabling technology for lead-bismuth-cooled reactors. The system is a functionally graded composite (FGC), with separate layers engineered to perform corrosion resistance and structural functions. Alloy F91 was chosen as the structural layer of the composite because of its strength and radiation resistance. An Fe-12Cr-2Si alloy was developed based on previous work in the Fe-Cr-Si system, and was used as the corrosion-resistant cladding layer because of its chemical similarity to F91 and its superior corrosion resistance in lead and lead-bismuth in both oxidizing and reducing environments. The availability of the FGC will have significant impacts on lead-bismuth reactor design. The allowable increases in outlet temperature and coolant velocity lead to a large increase in power density - either to a smaller core for the same power rating or to more power output for the same-size core. In this paper, we report on the overall design of the FGC. We also discuss the general implications for lead-bismuth-cooled reactor design. In a future paper, we will discuss the fabrication and the initial evaluation of the actual product produced using commercial processing methods.
