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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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Deep Space: The new frontier of radiation controls
In commercial nuclear power, there has always been a deliberate tension between the regulator and the utility owner. The regulator fundamentally exists to protect the worker, and the utility, to make a profit. It is a win-win balance.
From the U.S. nuclear industry has emerged a brilliantly successful occupational nuclear safety record—largely the result of an ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) process that has driven exposure rates down to what only a decade ago would have been considered unthinkable. In the U.S. nuclear industry, the system has accomplished an excellent, nearly seamless process that succeeds to the benefit of both employee and utility owner.
R. R. Paguio, A. Nikroo, K. M. Saito, J. F. Hund, E. R. Castillo, N. M. Ravelo, K. Quan
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 55 | Number 4 | May 2009 | Pages 450-455
Technical Paper | Eighteenth Target Fabrication Specialists' Meeting | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A7425
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Resorcinol formaldehyde (RF) foam shells are needed for direct-drive inertial confinement laser fusion experiments at the University of Rochester OMEGA laser facility. As previously reported, the addition of long-chained polymers to the fabrication process has improved shell wall uniformity, but this change has led to a lower yield (from ~40 to ~15%) of shells that are gas retentive after the application of glow discharge polymer (GDP) using the standard deposition technique. We have improved this yield by modifying the coating conditions of the GDP overcoating process by modifying the background coating pressure from the constant 75 mTorr to using a two-step coating process of a high-pressure coating at 250 mTorr followed by low-pressure coating of 75 mTorr. This modification has improved the yield of the gas retention on the styrene-butadiene-styrene RF shells from ~15 to ~60%. We have found that the surface roughness of these shells is also improved from ~45 nm root-mean-square (rms) to ~20 nm rms. This technique, however, leads to a slight shrinkage of shells, which will be described.