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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 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.
K.-J. Boehm, N. Hash, D. Barker, T. Döppner, M. P. Farrell, P. Fitzsimmons, D. Kaczala, D. Kraus, B. Maranville, M. Mauldin, P. Neumayer, K. Segraves
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 70 | Number 2 | August-September 2016 | Pages 324-331
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-242
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Reconciling the experimental and system requirements during the development of a new target system is one of the most challenging tasks in the design and engineering of targets used in the National Ignition Facility.
Targets for the GigaBar 3 campaign were meant to allow the detection of extremely weak Thomson scattering from matter at extreme densities in the face of very bright backlighter and laser entry hole plasma emissions. The problem was to shield the detector sufficiently while maintaining beamline and view clearances, and observing target mass restrictions.
A new construction process, based on a rapid prototype frame structure, was used to develop this target. Details of the design process for these targets are described, and lessons from this development for production and target assembly teams are discussed.
