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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.
L. Eric Smith, Naeem M. Abdurrahman
Nuclear Technology | Volume 140 | Number 3 | December 2002 | Pages 328-349
Technical Paper | Radiation Measurements and Instrumentation | doi.org/10.13182/NT02-A3343
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A Monte Carlo study of the neutron slowing-down spectrometry technique for measuring fissile isotopic content in irradiated fuel has been completed. The neutron spectrometer system is characterized in terms of design, slowing-down time relation, isotopic response functions, and assay signals. The nonlinear effect of interrogating neutron self-shielding for a high fissile content fuel is compared to the same parameter for a low fissile content fuel. Simulated assays of 23 different fuel assemblies with a broad range of total fissile mass content (1.3 to 83 wt%) and fissile isotopic ratios are performed and analyzed using two different methods: a linear system model using a least-squares regression analysis and a radial basis neural network. Mean errors using the linear system model for the 23 different fuel types were approximately 20% for 235U and 43% for total plutonium. The radial basis neural network assay signal solutions showed promising results, considerably better than the linear model: 4.9% for 235U, 5.4% for total plutonium, and 0.5% for total fissile content.
