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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
INL makes a case for eliminating ALARA and setting higher dose limits
A report just released by Idaho National Laboratory reviews decades of radiation protection standards and research on the health effects of low-dose radiation and recommends that the current U.S. annual occupational dose limit of 5,000 mrem be maintained without applying ALARA—the “as low as reasonably achievable” regulatory concept first introduced in 1971—below that threshold.
Noting that epidemiological studies “have consistently failed to demonstrate statistically significant health effects at doses below 10,000 mrem delivered at low dose rates,” the report also recommends “future consideration of increasing this limit to 10,000 mrem/year with appropriate cumulative-dose constraints.”
K. Okayama, D. van Houtte, F. Sagot, M. Walsh
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 2 | August 2013 | Pages 151-155
ITER | Proceedings of the Twentieth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE-2012) (Part 1), Nashville, Tennessee, August 27-31, 2012 | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-A18070
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The diagnostics are critical systems for the operation and research program of ITER, as they are used to protect the components, to control the plasma discharge, to understand the behaviour of the plasma and to measure its performance. Representing more than 50 subsystems, they add an extra level of complexity and technical challenge to the project. In order to ensure that the overall ITER machine will be able to reach its ambitious availability objective, a Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Inspectability (RAMI) approach has been defined and applied to the diagnostics as well as all the other ITER core systems.The purpose of this study is to estimate the inherent availability of the measurements groups used for machine protection and basic control in order to ensure that the ITER machine reaches its inherent availability objectives.
