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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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Latest News
Shifting the paradigm of supply chain
Chad Wolf
When I began my nuclear career, I was coached up in the nuclear energy culture of the day to “run silent, run deep,” a mindset rooted in the U.S. Navy’s submarine philosophy. That was the norm—until Fukushima.
The nuclear renaissance that many had envisioned hit a wall. The focus shifted from expansion to survival. Many utility communications efforts pivoted from silence to broadcast, showcasing nuclear energy’s elegance and reliability. Nevertheless, despite being clean baseload 24/7 power that delivered a 90 percent capacity factor or higher, nuclear energy was painted as risky and expensive (alongside energy policies and incentives that favored renewables).
Economics became a driving force threatening to shutter nuclear power. The Delivering the Nuclear Promise initiative launched in 2015 challenged the industry to sustain high performance yet cut costs by up to 30 percent.
A. E. Arave
Nuclear Technology | Volume 6 | Number 4 | April 1969 | Pages 332-335
Technical Papers and Note | doi.org/10.13182/NT69-A28341
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An ultrasonic system to plot the thickness profile of a fuel-element coolant channel was developed to measure the ETR and ATR fuel elements in a canal after being removed from the reactor. It has an accuracy of 0.5 mil, a resolution of 0.1 mil, and a range from 50 to 175 mils. The heart of the system is a probe holding two 8-MHz, 10-mil-thick lead zirconate titanate piezoelectric crystals. Distance between channel walls is obtained by measuring the time for an 8-MHz sound burst to travel between the crystals which are held next to the walls. The signal received by one crystal, transmitted from the other crystal, is used as a trigger for a time-to-analog converter that is connected to the y axis of a recorder. Longitudinal distance in the channel is converted to an analog output to drive the x axis of the same recorder.
