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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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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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.
G. L. Kulcinski et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 493-500
Experimental Facilities and Nonelectric Applications | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-21
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For the past 15 years, the Inertial Electrostatic Confinement (IEC) fusion group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has been conducting experiments to demonstrate that there can be many near term applications of fusion research long before the production of electricity in commercial fusion power plants. This research has concentrated on three fuel cycles: DD, D3He, and 3He3He. Some of the major accomplishments are listed below:a. The production of > 108 DD neutrons per second on a steady state basisb. The production of pulsed DD neutrons to over 1010 per second in 10Hz, 100 s bursts.c. The production of 14.7 MeV protons at > 108 per second (steady state) from the D3He reaction.d. Demonstrated the detection of the explosive C-4 with steady state DD neutrons.e. Demonstrated the detection of Highly Enriched U (HEU) with pulsed DD neutron fluxes.f. Production of the positron emission tomography (PET) isotopes, 94mTc and 13Nusing D3He protons.g. Production of the first measured 3He3He fusion reactions in an IEC device.h. Development of unique diagnostic techniques to measure the rate, spectrum, and location of fusion reactions in IEC devices.i. Use of an IEC device to study the behavior of materials at high temperature during charged particle bombardment.The accomplishments above were carried out in 3 devices HOMER, 3HeCTRE, and HELIOS that have operated up to 180 kV and meter currents of 65 mA. New applications are currently being explored and expanded roles for the IEC device will be described.
