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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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.
Robert A. Fjeld, Timothy A. DeVol, Russell W. Goff, Matthew D. Blevins, David D. Brown, Steven M. Ince, Alan W. Elzerman, Meredith E. Newman
Nuclear Technology | Volume 135 | Number 2 | August 2001 | Pages 92-108
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT01-A3208
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Laboratory column tests were performed to characterize the mobilities of 60Co, 90Sr, 137Cs, 233U, 239Pu, and 241Am in a basalt sample and a composite of sedimentary interbed from the Snake River Plain at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory. The radionuclides were spiked into a synthetic groundwater (pH 8, ionic strength = 0.004 M) and introduced into the columns (D = 2.6 cm, L = 15.2 cm) as finite steps with a width of 1 pore volume followed by unspiked synthetic groundwater. The effluent concentrations were measured continuously for up to 200 pore volumes. Hydrogen-3 was used as a nonreactive tracer in all of the experiments to monitor for channeling. In the basalt sample, the behavior of 90Sr, 137Cs, and 233U was quite different from that of 60Co, 239Pu, and 241Am. The column effluent curves for the former were characterized by single peaks containing, within the limits of experimental uncertainty, all of the activity in the spike. The mobilities were ordered as follows: 233U ([overbar]R = 5.6) > 90Sr ([overbar]R = 29) > 137Cs ([overbar]R = 79). The curves for the other radionuclides were characterized by two or three fractions, each having a distinctly different mobility. Cobalt-60 had high- ([overbar]R = < 3), intermediate- ([overbar]R = 34), and low- (R > 200) mobility fractions. Although a majority of the 239Pu and 241Am had low mobility (R > 200), there were high-mobility (R < 3) fractions of each (17 to 29% for 239Pu and 7 to 12% for 241Am). In sedimentary interbed, mobilities were generally much lower than in basalt. Uranium-233 was the only radionuclide with 100% recovery within 200 displaced pore volumes, and it had a retardation factor of 30. However, high-mobility fractions were observed for 60Co (1 to 4%) and 239Pu (1.1 to 2.4%). These results could have important implications with respect to transport modeling. If the multiple-mobility fractions observed here are also present in the field, transport predictions based on classical modeling approaches that incorporate mobilities from batch sorption experiments are likely to be in error.
