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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.
Samim Anghaie, Larry L. Humphries, Nils J. Diaz
Nuclear Technology | Volume 91 | Number 3 | September 1990 | Pages 376-387
Technical Paper | Material | doi.org/10.13182/NT90-A34458
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The differential gamma scattering spectroscopy technique is a novel means of nondestructive testing using Compton scattering to determine local density perturbations in a test sample. A narrow collimated beam of gamma rays irradiates a test sample, and the scattered radiation field is detected in a transversely placed high-purity germanium detector. This detector provides excellent energy resolution so that a detailed energy spectrum can be obtained. This spectrum is then subtracted from a reference spectrum that was collected from a well-known, unflawed sample to obtain the differential spectrum. This differential spectrum contains information characterizing the flaw. Using the relationship between scattering angle and scattering energy that characterizes Compton scattering, the single-scattered spectrum can be used to determine the location of scattering and, consequently, the density distribution along the portion of the primary beam path that passes through the sample. An attractive feature of this technique that distinguishes it from other Compton scattering techniques is the ability to detect flaws both on and off the primary beam path. A series of experiments was conducted to assess the sensitivity of the detection system for different sizes and shapes of flaws located throughout the sample. The results of these experiments are analyzed.