ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Division Spotlight
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
May 2025
Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
T. Akiyama, K. Kawahata, K. Tanaka, T. Tokuzawa, Y. Ito, S. Okajima, K. Nakayama, C. A. Michael, L. N. Vyacheslavov, A. Sanin, S. Tsuji-Iio, LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 352-363
Chapter 8. Diagnostics | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-8
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper describes the interferometer systems on the Large Helical Device (LHD). LHD is equipped with five interferometer systems, each of which has a different operational purpose and measurable electron density range. A single-channel millimeter-wave interferometer is mainly used for low-density plasmas along a horizontal line of sight on the equatorial plane. Wavelengths of 1 and 2 mm are used for vibration compensation based on two-color interferometry, which has been used since the first operation of LHD. A 13-channel CH3OH laser interferometer (wavelength of 119 m) covers almost the whole poloidal cross sections of LHD plasmas with a chord separation of 90 mm. It routinely provides temporal behavior and profiles of the electron density. The laser has been developed as a collaboration between the National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS) and Chubu University. An 80-channel CO2 laser interferometer (10.6 m) is employed for high-density plasmas such as superdense core plasmas. It adopts an imaging technique with three slablike beams and array detectors to measure the density profile precisely. A phase contrast imaging interferometer, which measures density fluctuations, is combined with the CO2 laser interferometer. Since LHD has strong magnetic shear, a distribution of the density fluctuations is evaluated by using shear technique. A conventional millimeter-wave (4 mm) interferometer is also installed at a divertor region to measure dynamic density responses in a divertor leg. The phase counter used on these interferometers was originally developed at NIFS. The phase resolution of a typical phase counter is 1/100 fringe with a temporal response of 10 s.