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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.
Ronald W. King, Erwin C. Filewicz
Nuclear Technology | Volume 52 | Number 1 | January 1981 | Pages 32-42
Technical Paper | Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT81-A32687
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Experimental Breeder Reactor II (EBR-II) is an unmoderated, sodium-cooled reactor with a design power level of 62.5 MW(thermal). The design uses a submerged pool concept in which the reactor and fuel handling components are contained in a primary tank filled with sodium. The in-tank fuel handling is done remotely with no visual contact of the fuel subassemblies or the in-tank portion of the fuel handling equipment. The fuel handling operations, therefore, depend on precise, predictable positioning of all equipment and subassemblies. In July 1978, during normal fuel handling operations, it was discovered that one of the subassemblies in the in-tank storage basket for reactor subassemblies was not in the proper position to be handled with the subassembly transfer arm. Months of diagnostic evaluation of the actual position and shape of the subassembly resulted in a full-size mockup of the equipment and of the subassembly involved. The diagnostic measurements were duplicated with the mockup, a special system for retrieving the subassembly was designed and built, and a procedure was prepared. Using the mockup, the special equipment and procedure were thoroughly tested, modified, and retested. The subassembly was retrieved from the storage basket and primary tank on May 11, 1979, with no major difficulties. During the time between the discovery of the problem and the retrieval of the sub-assembly, EBR-II reactor operations continued as normal except for minor inconveniences during fuel handling operations because of the position of the damaged subassembly. The overall success of this project gave confidence that abnormal situations of this type in a sodium-cooled, pot-type reactor can be handled, without visual contact, through careful planning and preparation.
