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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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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.
Osamu Mitarai, Akira Hirose, Harvey M. Skarsgard
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 19 | Number 2 | March 1991 | Pages 234-250
Technical Paper | Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST91-A29362
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The concept of a generalized ignition contour map, showing , and T, is used to study the ignition criterion for a D-3He fusion reactor with plasma temperature and density profiles. Direct heating scenarios to the D-3He ignition regime without the help of deuterium-tritium burning are considered. The machine size and enhancement factor for the confinement time required to reach D-3He ignition can be simply determined by comparing the height of the operation path with Goldston L-mode scaling and the height of the generalized saddle point. A confinement enhancement factor of 2 to 3 is required in the case of a large plasma current (30 to 80 MA) in a small-aspect-ratio tokamak. On the other hand, for a small plasma current (≲10 MA), large-aspect-ratio tokamak, an enhancement factor of 5 to 6 is necessary to reach ignition. Fuel dilution effects by fusion products and impurities, the confinement degradation effect due to 14-MeV protons, and the operation paths are also considered. To lower the height of the saddle point, and hence the auxiliary heating power, we optimize the fuel composition and examine operation in the hot ion mode.
