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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.
S. Sandri, A. Coniglio, A. Daniele, M. D'Arienzo, L. Di Pace, M. Pillon
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 2 | August 2011 | Pages 776-780
Safety & Environment | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12479
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
PRIMA consists of two experiments which will test at the same time the main components of the final system and the whole system. The facilities are named respectively SPIDER (Source for Production of Ion of Deuterium Extracted from RF Plasma - ion source only) and MITICA (Megavolt ITER Injector Concept Advanced - the main system). Both injectors accelerate negative deuterium ions with a maximum energy of 1 MeV for MITICA and 100 keV for SPIDER, and a maximum beam current of 40 A for both experiments.Following D-D and D-T reactions on the calorimeter panels, important neutron and photon fields are generated around the injectors; such secondary radiation fields represent a relevant issue from the radiological safety point of view. Major radiation protection issues are the activation of materials and components around the injectors, among which the vessel itself and the corrosion products formed in the cooling loops (by the chemical reaction between metal and water). Both these radiation sources may contribute to personnel dose during maintenance operation.In addition, radioactive tritium is produced inside the vessel (mainly in the MITICA facility) which is likely to be poured in the environment during operation phases thus representing a possible contamination pathway for workers and for the population living in the area surrounding the facility.Finally, important penetrations for the ventilation, the power supply and the auxiliary systems were arranged inside the facilities. Tunnels in the underground region, with relatively large dimensions, were needed for both MITICA and SPIDER bunkers in order to allow personnel access for inspection and maintenance of cables and ducts. Each of these shielding weaknesses may provide important dose contribution to radiation workers thus requiring specific safety analyses.In the present paper all major safety issues and relevant radiological concerns are analyzed with a detailed assessment of dose contribution to personnel working inside the facility. Specific dose evaluations were performed through Monte Carlo simulations.Radiation shielding and radiation protection criteria were realized in order to meet the Italian regulatory limit for non radiation workers, ie. below 1 mSv/yr. Our analysis and project evaluations confirm that this constraint is never exceeded during operating phases of the injectors.
