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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.
Brandon Wilson, Kelly McCary, Christian Petrie (ORNL), Thomas Blue (Ohio State)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 478-487
Sapphire optical fiber, with an internal cladding and an array of type-II Bragg gratings inscribed in it, was tested in-situ in the Ohio State Research Reactor (OSURR) to determine the viability of using sapphire as a sensor in an ionizing radiation environment. The sapphire fiber was attached to an optical frequency domain reflectometer (OFDR), which recorded the temperature of the fiber, at the locations of the gratings along the fiber, during the irradiations in the OSURR. The sapphire Bragg gratings survived the irradiations in the OSURR and produced reasonable temperature measurements for ~2.1 Equivalent Full Power Hours (EFPHs) of irradiation, corresponding to a neutron fluence of ~1.7 x 1017 n/cm2. The lead-in silica fiber, and perhaps the sapphire fiber itself, exhibited darkening, which affected sensing during the third day of irradiation; but adjusting the sensitivity of the OFDR corrected for this. During the reactor irradiations on the following day, the fiber produced reasonable temperature measurements to a four day total irradiation of ~8.8 EFPH, corresponding to a neutron fluence of ~7.3 x 1017 n/cm2. In summary, the sapphire sensors survived to fluences that are larger than those that they must withstand for testing in TREAT (~1 x 1017 n/cm2). The accuracy and precision of these sensors still needs to be determined. Also, it is must be acknowledge that fiber darkening in silica and sapphire may be flux dependent.