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.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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
Sep 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2025
Nuclear Technology
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.
N. Yanagi, S. Imagawa, H. Sekiguchi, A. Ninomiya, K. Takahata, S. Hamaguchi, T. Obana, T. Mito, LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 571-580
Chapter 12. Superconducting Magnet System | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A10844
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Performance of the superconducting helical coils of the Large Helical Device (LHD) during the past 12 cooling cycles is reviewed. The pair of helical coils are pool cooled by liquid helium and wound with aluminum-stabilized NbTi/Cu composite-type superconductors. Intensive efforts have been made to reliably carry out excitations, as more than 20 temporary normal transitions were observed. It was found that the minimum propagation current was about 10% lower than the nominal operation current. To improve the cryogenic stability, subcooled liquid helium has been supplied since 2006 using cold compressors, and the inlet temperature is lowered to be 3.2 K. The toroidal magnetic field has been raised by 5% and the plasma parameters are being enhanced. Pulse-height analysis is successfully applied on the balance voltage and acoustic emission signals to investigate the mechanical properties of the windings and their changes in years of operation. Short-duration normal transitions are automatically detected using a sophisticated monitoring system and careful operations are continued.
