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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 Science and Engineering
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Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
October 2025
Latest News
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.
M. Reinhart et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 63 | Number 1 | May 2013 | Pages 201-204
doi.org/10.13182/FST13-A16905
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this work we investigate the applicability of several optical emission spectroscopy methods to measure the electron density and temperature in deuterium plasma in the linear plasma generator PSI-2. The spectroscopy measurements are realized by an imaging spectrometer which delivers radial profiles of the emission lines. With the application of an inverse Abel transformation, spatially resolved measurements are obtained.The spectroscopy methods divide into two groups: The measurement of ne by Balmer line ratios and by the rotational temperature of molecules is only suitable for ionizing plasmas; the measurement of ne by the Stark broadening of Paschen lines and of Te by Paschen line ratios is only applicable for recombining plasmas.For the evaluation of these methods, different plasma conditions are produced in PSI-2. The plasma generator is capable of producing deuterium plasmas with electron densities of up to 1013 cm-3 and electron temperatures of up to 20 eV. Additional measurements with a Langmuir double probe are conducted for comparison with the spectroscopy measurements.A collisional-radiative model in the Yacora code is used to compare measured Balmer line emissions with the calculation and to investigate which reaction channels influence the recombination in PSI-2.
