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.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
Mar 2026
Jan 2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
April 2026
Nuclear Technology
February 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Going Nuclear: Notes from the officially unofficial book tour
I work in the analytical labs at one of Europe’s oldest and largest nuclear sites: Sellafield, in northwestern England. I spend my days at the fume hood front, pipette in one hand and radiation probe in the other (and dosimeter pinned to my chest, of course). Outside the lab, I have a second job: I moonlight as a writer and public speaker. My new popular science book—Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World—came out last summer, and it feels like my life has been running at full power ever since.
Jeongtae Cho, Gyunyoung Heo, Young-Seok Lee, Hyuk-Jong Kim
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 69-74
doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12407
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Korean fusion technology roadmap specifies the construction of a fusion power plant at demonstrative scale by 2030. Obviously, the safety requirements for demonstration fusion reactors will be quite different and more stringent than that of experimental reactors. Nevertheless, the regulatory framework for such reactors was not fully matured due to the limited resources and the lack of technical feasibility in Korea. Sharing with the motivation, this research investigated and compared the safety characteristics of fission and fusion power plants to facilitate designing of engineered safety features. Korea has gained a vast experience over the last 30 years, regarding design, construction and operation of both pressurized light and heavy water reactors, which is useful to address the attributes for fission power plants. In case of fusion reactor technology, the operational experiences with ITER and K-STAR can be referred, considering their demonstration scale. Comparative study was performed in top-down manner. We compared the top requirements such as safety principles and defense-in-depth for fusion and fission power plants. The inherent safety parameters such as the reactivity feedback coefficients of fission power plants were investigated how these parameters would be represented in fusion power plants. The limits for operating conditions for a fusion reactor were investigated to recognize important parameters which would contribute to nuclear safety or, more specifically accident prevention. For the accidents beyond the operation limits, the need of engineering safety features was found indispensable for accident mitigation. However, it is anticipated that the engineering safety features for fusion reactors will be reduced in number, size, type, and safety-margin because the total amount of hazardous material is much lower as compared to fission reactors. Finally we proposed the table of contents of safety analysis report for fusion power plants borrowing the basic structure from the safety reports on fission reactors. The outcome of this study helps to prioritize research projects to be devoted for analyzing the safety of demonstration fusion plant, and to develop design and regulatory framework in South Korea.