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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.
Aljaž Čufar, Paola Batistoni, Sean Conroy, Zamir Ghani, Igor Lengar, Sergey Popovichev, Brian Syme, Žiga Štancar, Luka Snoj, JET Contributors
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 74 | Number 4 | November 2018 | Pages 370-386
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2018.1475163
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The fusion power output of fusion plasmas is measured using the neutron yield detectors due to its linear relation to the fusion yield. Absolutely calibrated neutron yield detectors are thus a crucial part of the plasma diagnostics system and the absolute accuracy of their calibration must be ensured.
The transition of the Joint European Torus’s (JET’s) first wall material from carbon (C) wall to ITER-like (Be/W/C) first wall was a significant change in the structure of the machine and recalibration of the main neutron yield detectors was needed to maintain the required measurement uncertainty of less than ±10%. The neutron yield detectors were thus recalibrated through two in situ calibrations to deuterium-deuterium neutrons in 2013 and deuterium-tritium neutrons in 2017 using 252Cf spontaneous fission source and a compact neutron generator, respectively.
We describe the extensive neutronics calculations performed in support of these latest calibration experiments. These analyses were performed using Monte Carlo simulations to better understand the calibration procedure, optimize the experiments, ensure personnel safety, and quantify the effects of the uncharacteristic circumstances during calibration experiments. This paper focuses on assessments of the effects of the uncharacteristic circumstances, e.g., the presence of the remote handling system in the machine due to its use in neutron source delivery, difference in the neutron emission spectrum, and differences in the neutron source shape. Lessons learned, findings, and relevance for calibrations of future large tokamaks are discussed.