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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.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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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Fusion Science and Technology
May 2025
Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
A. Serikov, U. Fischer, R. Heidinger, H. Tsige-Tamirat, Y. Luo
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 53 | Number 1 | January 2008 | Pages 184-195
Technical Paper | Special Issue on Electron Cyclotron Wave Physics, Technology, and Applications - Part 2 | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1664
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) will use an electron cyclotron resonance heating (ECRH) system in the upper port of the device for plasma stabilization, heating, and current drive by injecting millimeter wave beams into the plasma chamber. The millimeter waves are transmitted to the plasma through long and narrow waveguide channels. The required plasma wall openings could result in enhanced neutron radiation loadings to the ECRH launcher and neighboring reactor components. The analyses aimed at proving that the shielding requirements and all related nuclear design limits specified by ITER can be met for the proposed ECRH launcher design concepts. The nuclear criteria included human safety issues, nuclear waste regulation aspects, and radiation shielding requirements. The proof was conducted by calculating the radiation loads to sensitive components such as the diamond window of the ECRH launcher, the vacuum vessel, and the superconducting magnets and assessing the potential radiation doses to work personnel during shutdown periods. Dedicated computational approaches were developed to handle the related neutron streaming and shielding problems on the basis of three-dimensional Monte Carlo calculations by the MCNP code. Suitable MCNP models of the launcher were generated by the automatic conversion of the underlying computer assisted design models using a newly developed interface program. The results of the analyses show that all radiation design limits can be safely met for the considered launcher and shield designs.