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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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.
A. E. Costley
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 55 | Number 1 | January 2009 | Pages 1-15
Technical Paper | Electron Cyclotron Emission and Electron Cyclotron Resonance Heating | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A4048
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Electron cyclotron emission (ECE) has been of interest in fusion research since the beginning, in the late 1950s, of the worldwide effort to realize fusion energy. The initial interest was in its contribution to the power loss, which under some conditions was predicted to be a possible impediment to achieving net power generation from fusion. The current interest centers on the use of measurements of the emission as a powerful means of determining the value of some of the main parameters of the plasma: Most modern tokamaks and stellarators are equipped with extensive ECE measurement systems. Creativity, surprises, debate, careful experimentation, and solid theoretical work characterize the path in between, which has not always been smooth but through the diagnostic applications has ultimately been very successful. In this paper, we trace that path by identifying and illustrating the main developments. We also take a brief look forward. The transport of energy due to ECE is expected to play a significant role in the burn dynamics of fusion plasmas, and this role is outlined. Measurements of ECE are expected to play an important role in the diagnosis of future fusion machines, like ITER, that will achieve thermonuclear conditions. There are significant benefits and challenges associated with making measurements of ECE on such plasmas, and these are briefly summarized.