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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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Nuclear Technology
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.
S. K. Combs et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 3 | September 2013 | Pages 513-520
Fusion Technologies: Heating and Fueling | Proceedings of the Twentieth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE-2012) (Part 2) Nashville, Tennessee, August 27-31, 2012 | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-A19144
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A compact pellet injector has been built/tested at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) for the TJ-II stellarator. The design is an upgraded version of that used for the ORNL injector installed on the Madison Symmetric Torus (MST). It is a four-barrel system equipped with a cryogenic refrigerator for in situ hydrogen pellet formation, a propellant valve system for pellet acceleration (speeds ~1000 m/s), pellet diagnostics, and an injection line. On TJ-II, it will be used as an active diagnostic and for fueling. To accommodate the plasma experiments planned for TJ-II, pellet sizes significantly smaller than those used for the MST application are required. The system has been initially equipped with four pellet sizes, with the gun barrel bores ranging between 0.4 and 1.0 mm. The most challenging technical issue is achieving reliable operation with the smallest pellet size. The system is described, highlighting the new features added since the original MST injector was constructed. Results from laboratory testing are presented and discussed, including the range of pellet sizes and speeds that will be available for initial experiments on TJ-II and the expected reliability of delivering intact pellets to the plasmas.
