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.
Division Spotlight
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
Meeting Spotlight
Utility Working Conference Virtual Summit (UWC)
August 11, 2020
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Aug 2020
Jan 2020
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
July 2020
Nuclear Technology
August 2020
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Penfield and Enos: Outage planning in the COVID-19 era
Penfield
Enos
Energy Harbor’s Beaver Valley plant, located about 34 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, Pa., was one of many nuclear sites preparing for a scheduled outage as the coronavirus pandemic intensified in March. The baseline objective of any planned outage—to complete refueling on time and get back to producing power—was complicated by the need to prevent the transmission of COVID-19.
While over 200 of the plant’s 850 staff members worked from home to support the outage, about 800 contractors were brought in for jobs that could only be done on-site. Nuclear News Staff Writer Susan Gallier talked with Beaver Valley Site Vice President Rod Penfield and General Plant Manager Matt Enos about the planning and communication required.
Beaver Valley can look forward to several more outages in the future, now that plans to shut down the two Westinghouse pressurized water reactors, each rated at about 960 MWe, were reversed in March. “The deactivation announcement happened in the middle of all our planning,” Enos said. “It’s a shame we haven’t had a chance to get together as a large group and celebrate that yet.”
While the focus remains on safe pandemic operations, the site now has two causes for celebration: an outage success and a long future ahead.
P. V. Subhash, Amit Kumar Singh, Hitesh Pandya, V. S. Divya, M. P. Aparna, T. K. Basitha Thanseem
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 72 | Number 1 | July 2017 | Pages 49-59
Technical Paper | dx.doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2016.1273692
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For high-temperature tokamaks like ITER, electron cyclotron emission (ECE) measurements are expected to be affected by many factors like relativistic downshift, harmonics overlap, polarization scrambling, deviation of electron distribution from Maxwellian, etc. Many studies are already reported on the difference between ECE measurements and other measurements like Thomson scattering for existing high-temperature tokamaks like JET, TFTR, D-III-D, etc. As ITER is expected to reach a temperature of around 25 keV with a strong electron-ion coupling and additional heating, the deviation of the ECE radiation temperature from the electron temperature needs to be examined. This paper reports a parametric study on the effect of the presence of small superthermal populations on ECE measurements for ITER. A wide range of parametric space for superthermal parameters is used, assuming a bi-Maxwellian electron distribution, which obeys Kirchhoff law. The computational details and the results of the numerical studies are explained in this paper. Further, an attempt is also made to reconstruct the superthermal contributions from multiple oblique measurements, which is otherwise a difficult task. This reconstruction has been done through numerical calculations for two sets of measurements using detectors placed at same but opposite angles. Then, a scale factor is used to scale the difference between these two measurements to superthermal emission. The detailed procedure and possible physical explanations are presented. The dependence of this scale factor on the superthermal parameters is numerically studied, and a parametric equation is drafted between scale factor and superthermal parameters. The said equation contains two numerical constants, for which the values are numerically obtained from one set of simulations and verified with a number of calculations using different superthermal parameters.
