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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.
Trevor L. Cook, Steven M. Mirsky
Nuclear Technology | Volume 76 | Number 1 | January 1987 | Pages 166-171
Fourth International Retran Meeting | Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow | doi.org/10.13182/NT87-A33907
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
As a part of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s unresolved safety issue A-45 decay heat removal program, the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) performed a TRAC-PF1 simulation of the Calvert Cliffs Unit 1 pressurized water reactor in a cooldown to residual heat removal (RHR) entry conditions after a loss of off-site power (LOSP). A detailed four-loop TRAC model developed for the A-49 pressurized thermal shock program was used. The LANL results indicated an inability to both cool down and depressurize the primary system sufficiently to meet RHR entry conditions using only the atmospheric dump valves and auxiliary pressurizer spray. A RETRAN-02/MOD3 analysis was performed for the same transient, using assumptions consistent with those in the LANL analysis. A fast-running one-loop RETRAN model was selected because of the inherent symmetry of the transient. The RETRAN results compared well with sensitivity analyses indicating that the pressurizer model dominates the transient signatures. A best estimate RETRAN analysis of the cooldown was performed using a more accurate set of assumptions to better understand actual plant operational responses. These results indicate that RHR entry could be achieved after an LOSP using only existing plant equipment and procedures.
