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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.
Al-Amin Ahmed Simon, Karishmae Kadrager, Baharceh Badamchi, Harish Subbaraman, Maria Mitkova (Boise State Univ)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 39-48
Temperature sensing is an integral part of any nuclear reactor facilities. However, high radiation and temperature degrade the sensing materials which in turn makes the sensors less reliable. In this paper, chalcogenide glasses are proposed as temperature sensing materials for reactor facilities. Chalcogenide glasses go through amorphous to crystalline phase transformation when heated up to their crystallization temperature. This phase transition changes both the electrical and optical properties of the chalcogenide glasses. They are amorphous in nature and radiation hard due to their specific electronic structure and high defect density. Difference in reflected power at 1310 nm and 1550 nm wavelengths as a function of temperature, from chalcogenide glass-silica interface can be utilized to measure temperature and this effect is applied in the device presented in this paper. A review of the radiation hardness and a study of thermally induced change in optical properties of Ge-containing chalcogenide glasses along with a device architecture are presented as a method for temperature monitoring in nuclear facilities.
