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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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Fusion Science and Technology
October 2025
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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.
R.B Stephens, S.W. Haan, D.C. Wilson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 41 | Number 3 | May 2002 | Pages 226-233
Technical Paper | Fourteenth Target Fabrication Specialists' Meeting | doi.org/10.13182/FST02-A17904
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Successful ignition in NIF will require targets that meet stringent standards as to symmetry, composition, and dimensions. We describe here the current understanding of specifications for baseline indirect drive targets of each of the three types of ablators: beryllium, polyimide, and plasma polymer. These specifications include the range of values for all targets of each group, and the variation in value allowed in a specific target of that group. They cover all of the components which make up a target, and which are critical to an implosion: the hohlraum and its components — windows, capsule support foil and gas fill — and the shell and its DT ice layer. These specifications are preliminary and incomplete; they will necessarily evolve with design details and with increasing understanding of target dynamics. They are compiled here as a reference for the ICF community and a basis on which to plan future work: to fill in the gaps and to develop thenecessary characterization techniques. Future work will also include the requirements for direct drive targets.