ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Sep 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
October 2025
Latest News
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.
Wayne R. Zeuch
Nuclear Technology | Volume 51 | Number 3 | December 1980 | Pages 476-488
Technical Paper | Mechanics Applications to Fast Breeder Reactor Safety / Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT80-A32583
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
There has been an emphasis, recently, on the calculation of potential hazards beyond the primary containment of liquid-metal fast breeder reactors. A number of analyses have been conducted in order to follow the progression of a highly energetic core disruptive accident from its inception to its consequences in secondary containment. The investigation is limited to the direct mechanical effects of the initial core disassembly phase. An effort has been made to develop an integrated treatment of the accident sequence by extending the capability of primary containment codes, when necessary, to treat as broad a range of accident phenomena as possible. Beginning with the initiation phase, the release of energy to reactor internals and primary containment boundary is discussed. Emphasis must be placed on highly energetic accidents if the intent is to generate such severe phenomena as missiles and sodium spillage. Characterization of energetic events is accomplished by deriving work potential as a function of reactivity insertion in the reactor core. This source term is used for the primary containment analysis. Energy partitioning for hypothetical core disruptive accidents within the primary containment provides information concerning the system integrity and the potential for consequences that go beyond the primary containment boundary. The behavior of the reactor cover deserves special attention. During the slug impact phase, forces transmitted to the head would be the source for potential missiles and can open leak paths for sodium spillage. Studies on missile generation and sodium spillage are currently being performed to estimate the potential effects on secondary containment. Scoping calculations of generic missiles, generated by sodium slug impact loadings, as well as the coupled motion of an unrestrained reactor plug during the impact transient have been completed. Modeling of penetrations in the reactor cover for sodium spillage has been accomplished and spillage due to sodium impact on the reactor cover has been investigated.
