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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.
N. H. Balshaw, Y. Krivchenkov, G. Phillips, S. Davis, R. Pampin-Garcia
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 2 | August 2009 | Pages 661-665
ITER | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8984
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Many of the ITER diagnostic systems will be mounted in the equatorial and upper ports of the torus, supported plugs support the diagnostics and provide functions of baking, cooling, and neutron shielding. They must operate reliably in the demanding ultra-high vacuum, high radiation environment of the ITER tokamak for many years.Recent work on the mechanical design of the equatorial port plugs is reported, including a proposal for a new conceptual design, which uses the lid of the port plug as a structural member. The design of a complex component like this is an iterative process considering the interaction of the features of the port plug structure, neutron shielding components and diagnostic components with the electromagnetic forces induced in the structure by plasma disruptions.These electromagnetic forces are recognised to dominate the requirements for the strength of the structure. Much work has been carried out on this topic by other people, but generally this has been based on models which make assumptions about the boundary conditions. An ANSYS electromagnetic model of a half-sector of ITER has now been developed by UKAEA, to study the induced forces in the equatorial port plugs.
