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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.
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2021 Student Conference
April 8–10, 2021
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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!
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January 2021
Latest News
Fukiushima Daiichi: 10 years on
The Fukushima Daiichi site before the accident. All images are provided courtesy of TEPCO unless noted otherwise.
It was a rather normal day back on March 11, 2011, at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant before 2:45 p.m. That was the time when the Great Tohoku Earthquake struck, followed by a massive tsunami that caused three reactor meltdowns and forever changed the nuclear power industry in Japan and worldwide. Now, 10 years later, much has been learned and done to improve nuclear safety, and despite many challenges, significant progress is being made to decontaminate and defuel the extensively damaged Fukushima Daiichi reactor site. This is a summary of what happened, progress to date, current situation, and the outlook for the future there.
Oliviero Barana, Adriano Luchetta, Cesare Taliercio
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 2 | August 2009 | Pages 972-976
Plasma Engineering | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 2) | dx.doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A9036
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The current RFX-mod machine control system relies upon proprietary products for control (PLCs) and supervision (SCADA). To improve the software versatility and to overcome increasing difficulties with legacy products, a major overhaul is being implemented. The new architecture retains the modularity of the current one, but Javais used to program most of the control tasks and the graphical user interfaces, moving the control functions to a new PC-based layer. The physical layer of the communication employs Industrial Ethernet technology for the local area network; data exchange is based on TCP/IP and OPC communication protocols, and on MDS plus technology. The master scheduler talks to non-PLC subsystems using TCP/IP and exchanges data with the tasks on the PLCs through the MDS plus transport layer and OPC. One Windows PC hosts the OPC and MDS plus servers; other PCs execute the control functions and provide the graphical user interface.This paper describes and analyses the current architecture of the RFX-mod machine control system and the renewed one, which is under development. The first encouraging tests, concerning mainly the communication performance, are reported.